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> Assuming one in five are crewed, with 100 crew per vehicle, that means 3000 deaths over the life of the program. A failure in the rocket does not mean everyb
by nickik 10y ago
> Assuming one in five are crewed, with 100 crew per vehicle, that means 3000 deaths over the life of the program.
A failure in the rocket does not mean everybody dies. There is a launch abort system for that. Musk has confirmed this after the presentation.
- dredmorbius 10y agoLaunch abort should provide a safety margin on launch. It does less well in other segments of the mission, such as deep space, reentry, or landing. If you're looking at deep space missions, there've been issues at all of these. There are also the instances of missions (Japan fairly recently in a Venus probe) where issues affecting an unmanned flight but not causing failure of the mission, would result in failure of a manned flight (expenditure of all life support resources). The estimates here do suggest some significant loss of life will be expected. That's not unheard of in voyages of discovery, colonisation, and exploration.
- nickik 10y agoI agree, I just wanted to say that during the actual launch, two major systems need to fail before you start losing lives. That makes it different from the Shuttle for example.