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by ddeck 920 days ago
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

1 comments

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.