[kanox]

> let's talk about failures, unrecoverable ones.

Then why is spaceX at 93%? 2 unrecoverable failures in 59 campaigns equals 96.6% success.

All the competitors you listed have roots in government space programs going back many decades. Rockets tend to have a lot of "infant mortality" that those programs are way past.

Also, some of your claims are value/wrong: the Delta and Long March families are very large and very old and if you count the earliest attempts of governments to build ICBMs you get reliability figures worse than SpaceX.

Conversely the H-IIA, Delta 4, Atlas 5, Ariane 5 have fewer than 100 launches each.

Good data can be found here: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logsum.html

[rory096]

  (ATLAS ORBITAL     325(46)     .86    .86)

  (ALL ATLAS         582(116)    .80    .80)

Ouch.

[kadenshep]

>the Delta and Long March families are very large and very old and if you count the earliest attempts of governments to build ICBMs you get reliability figures worse than SpaceX.

"If you do this thing that you didn't do, you get worse figures."

Um, okay.

[kanox]

But you did write (entire family) for Delta and Long March. Your data is confusing and wrong.

[kadenshep]

...for orbital launches, which is quite literally what 99% of these rockets have been used for. Which also is exactly what we are talking about.

It's only confusing if you're wanting to be disingenuous.