Mike Reiss took the sub trip to the Titanic in the summer of 2022, and in his podcast he says his wife didn't go with him because she failed a Covid test right before. It's unclear whether it was her decision or OceanGate's decision to play it safe. Reiss notes that during Covid, his wife had traveled to every continent without catching it until now, so she wasn't extremely paranoid. If OceanGate denied her, then it means they were worried more about the health risk of Covid in late 2022 than having to (partially) refund her $250k ticket.

I don't think Covid is by any means "just the flu", but I definitely think the risk of dying from it is significantly less than a visit to the Titanic.

https://twitter.com/MikeReissWriter/status/15450925299718184...

https://bleav.com/shows/what-am-i-doing-here-with-mike-reiss...

Family member claims he was terrified and did it because it was important for his titanic obsessed father. So, it is more of 19 years old overcomes fear to get fathers validation and make father happy. Then both him and dad dies and there, I blame the dad.

The average human is more likely to die driving to the supermarket than in a commercial jet airliner crash, so I don't know how useful any of these comparisons are, especially for laymen.

We're comparing technology where safety is measured in incidents per hundred million miles traveled to one where the total number of annual travelers can fit into a single jumbo jet.

As Dave Barry assured us, LASIK eye surgery is perfectly safe, as long as the doctor remembers to change the laser setting to "delicate" from "vaporize bulldozer".

I've seen that point brought up during a conference tech talk and when asked, most of the audience raised their hands up saying they would fly on a Space Shuttle regardless.

The Space Shuttle was terrible, but not because it was dangerous.

For policy purposes, killing people has a cost that can be estimated by the statistical value of a human life (especially if the people are volunteers with full knowledge of the risk.) The value of a human life is about $9 M (which comes from estimates of how much government spending is needed to save 1 life, for example by medical care, installing guard rails on roads, etc.). If there was a 2% risk of death of the seven crew on a flight, this would have added $1.26M to the expected cost of a launch. This was small compared to the actual cost of a launch.

Viewed another way: a $900 M (say) shuttle launch would be killing 100 statistical people each and every launch (in the sense that the money spent on the launch, if spent elsewhere, could avoid 100 deaths). If the results of the launch are worth that many statistical deaths, why not .14 more?

This is a whole other can of worms, but the requirement that space exploration be manned was made for political rather than scientific reasons and has held back the progress of space exploration for decades. We could have done so much more if we hadn't had to worry about getting a robot back.

The purpose was wildy different. What about those odds for Bezos space tourism? Those shuttles were actually used to expand human knowledge. Both titan or blue origin only expand the reach of capitalist tourism.