[Gazoche]

> The risk of spaceflight is still very high. Wiki [1] lists 676 people as having traveled to space, of whom 19 have died in accidents as a result of that travel, meaning that going to space has about a 3% chance of killing you.

But 14 of those were caused by the shuttle alone. All the others were over 50 years ago. So far, all the spacecrafts still in use today have had a pretty good track record.

[Retric]

That 19 is a rather narrow list. It excludes the Apollo 1 mission where astronauts died in the spaceship during a rehearsal etc. In total 11 died during training including a cosmonaut in 1993 and a Spaceship 2 test pilot in 2014. “As of 2024, there have been over 188 fatalities in incidents regarding spaceflight.”

The shuttle also carried over half of all astronauts (355) on orbital missions, so if you’re excluding the shuttle it’s not that much safer.

Soyuz MS is a refined design, but Soyusz 11 killed 3 people and Soyuz 1 killed 1. Calling it a different design isn’t unreasonable but by that token it would be limited to 22 successful crewed missions and 1 in progress.

[wongarsu]

Out of 355 astronauts that have ever used the shuttle, which comes out to about 4%. Not that much worse.

The shuttle's lack of a launch abort mechanism is something NASA wouldn't accept in any modern human-rated spacecraft. But arguably the deadliest feature of the shuttle was that it was pushed as the single launch platform for all launches, even those that didn't require any crew. Putting crew on every single flight made many missions more risky than they had to be

[cfraenkel]

And also made missions at least 3X more expensive..... It wasn't just the on-paper launch costs. Everything had to be man-rated, meaning, among many other things, everything that operated during the launch had to be triple redundant, all the pyros had to be unpowered while onboard the shuttle (meaning you had to design another system to then power up the pyros and make it reliable), you needed three full launch crews (Cape, Johnson, plus wherever you actually ran your own ops) and all three launch crews had to support an endless set of rehearsals and launch delays.... The costs kept mounting. (source - was in program office of expendable launch comm sat, each satellite was ~$150M, launch was ~$80M. Roughly comparable mission down the hall cost ~$300M / satellite, ~$500M / launch.)

[dboreham]

We're there more Soviet accidents that we don't know about?

[bombcar]

Probably on the ground, but we likely know or highly suspect most of the ones in the air or in space.