Hacker News Reader

> There is some amount of expectation that the rocket will blow up before they get in to space. Nobody wants it, but they are the best of us and they are courageous as heck.

The B-17 aircrews in WW2 knew they had only a 20% chance of surviving their mission count intact. (not killed, crippled, or POW'd)

Neil Armstrong figured he only had a 50% chance of surviving Apollo 11. Personally, I think he was optimistic.

View on HN

Not only that, but thousands (>10k) of WW2 aviators died in training before deployment.

Those airplanes were not safe. They were designed for maximum performance, not safety.

not performance, performance to cost ratio

Like B-17 crew could refuse orders. That is not how draft works! It was slavery!

B-17 crews were all volunteers.

None of them were drafted? In general army only 29% soldiers were volunteers. I find it hard to believe they all volunteered.

And I found a few cases where instructors were assigned to B-17 as a punishment.

They all joined the Army Air Corps as volunteers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com