[resolutebat]

That's an odd assertion. Sure, we have a somewhat higher tolerance for risk for unmanned spaceflights, but we don't have particularly high requirements for unmanned drones either. But the reliability requirements for something like Starliner are ridiculously high and that's why it's taken a decade for the first manned flight.

[namirez]

A starliner is not nearly as reliable as a Boeing 777. Just look at what happened to the space shuttle. That’s also why Russians had reliable launch vehicles but not so reliable jetliners.

[resolutebat]

Those "unreliable" jetliners still complete orders of magnitude more flights between crashes than "reliable" launch vehicles. Angara A5, Russia's latest and greatest, had 1 failure out of 4 launches so far.

[somenameforme]

You're completely correct, but I think using the Angara A5 is a bit misleading. That's still in testing, and the one failure was because the exact part they were testing (the upper stage system) failed - it's more akin to something like the Starship, even if nowhere near as ambitious. It'd be more reasonable to compare something like the Soyuz-U, which has successfully sent hundreds of people to the ISS. Yet its overall failure rate is still dramatically higher than an airplane with 765 successful launches and 22 failures.

If airplanes had the same failure rates as even the most reliable rockets in existence, we'd be seeing tens to hundreds of crashes per day. Of course it's not because rockets are "allowed" to fail more regularly, but because this is the best we can currently manage.

[quartesixte]

The lifetime requirements for a lot of components even with crewed capsules and human-rated launch vehicles is an order of magnitude lower than aircraft.

“An airliner has to survive 13 hours in the air. A rocket only has to survive 13 minutes.”

[sdwr]

The only real issue is that rocket launches are 100x (1000x? 1MMx?) more expensive than plane takeoffs, so the feedback loop is more difficult.