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Comment by hypercube33 | Hacker News Reader

It really blows my mind that the space shuttle was really so sound and safe even though I want to argue that it could have been far better. I mean this compared to SpaceX stuff blowing up a bunch before it gets the kinks worked out - I don't remember seeing or hearing about any prototype shuttles blowing up but it was before my time.

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They did blow up 2 Shuttles out of 5, both crewed, so maybe they didn't get the all the kinks worked out in the first place.

Plenty of rockets did blow up on the launchpad or at various stages.

For example, the Titan I failed 17 launches, the Titan 2 failed 10 (and one exploded in the silo, while attached to a nuclear warhead), and the Atlas E/F failed 9. Even more recently, into the 90s and 00s, the Atlas I lost 3 and every Ariane variant has lost at least one.

I'm hardly a Musk fan, but although SpaceX seems particularly gung-ho about testing things they know aren't finished in order to iterate the design faster, the results after that are pretty good so far: Falcon 9 is 281 "real" flights for 2 failures, plus that one that went bang on the launchpad.

It's not 100% success rate like the Saturns, but out of 21 launches between the 1B and V, there were several near misses there. And probably quite a few A-4/V2s were harmed in the making of them and their predecessors too!

17000000 Deaths per billion flights for the space shuttle is not safe. This is more than 2,000 times more dangerous than skydiving, which is also not very safe.

It was significantly worse than that.

There were 2 failures over a total of 135 flights, with 14 fatalities. So that's about 103 fatalities per 1000 flights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

I think it's "passenger fatalities per passenger-journey". So need to multiply the number of flights by the crew on each.

Right you are, which brings us back to the ~1.7% number (actually 1.6% if you include the STS-135 mission, which Wikipedia doesn't for unknown reasons).

So a 1 in ~60 chance of dying on any given flight...have to agree that that is far from safe.

Others here have addressed the question of whether it was safe even by space flight standards, but as to whether it could have been far better, the refractory-surfaces problem alone seems to have put an upper limit on that.

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