4 ms·
Granted that current Soyuz is the most reliable human-carrying spacecraft today (not that there's much competition). And granted that the Shuttle was deeply wei
by meredydd 8y ago
Granted that current Soyuz is the most reliable human-carrying spacecraft today (not that there's much competition). And granted that the Shuttle was deeply weird and a bad idea.
But Wikipedia tells me that the next Soyuz to go up will be #142, counting from Gagarin. In the hypothetical world where (say) the Mir crisis had been fatal, Soyuz would have a lifetime success rate almost exactly the same as the Shuttle's.
Even if the new ones are much better, we don't have the statistical power to say. Gimme the kitbuilt Piper any day.
- consp 8y agoConsidering the Soyuz-U has over 700 launches and the R7 family has over 1000 (of which all Suyuz launch vehicles are part), only taking the manned versions is a somewhat distorted comparison (though not unfavorable in some aspects). The Soyuz-success/failure manned rate is about the same as the space shuttle, though a bit higher but with successful escapes and launch aborts. If you start comparing casualties the space shuttle loses massively as only 4 cosmonauts have died, all in the decent stage (either crashed or died on entry) with the R7 and derivatives as launch vehicles and Suyuz or Voskhod as name. To be fair, the total of the R7 family (which is skewed since there are way more failures in the early days than after the 1990's for all kinds of rockets) is 137 vs 1755 or about 7 % vs the 1.5% of the space shuttle.