You seem to be implying that something near complete safety is practical with enough work. I'm not sure this is the case. A big problem with all endeavors, and

You seem to be implying that something near complete safety is practical with enough work. I'm not sure this is the case. A big problem with all endeavors, and not just space, is that things that work (or don't work) in theory somehow often end up doing the exact opposite in practice. This is why things become more safe at scale: you get to see those abnormal conditions play out in reality, and work to prevent such failures in the future. In rocketry we're still babies. We've launched, in total, something like 8000 rockets - hundreds have failed. And we've only launched around 600 humans to space on a small fraction of those 8,000 launches. Just consider something like a software launch. No matter how much effort you expend trying to make things go perfectly, or how many months of beta testing you engage in - something's going to go wrong. And that's in a nearly completely deterministic environment. Space travel involves countless external nondeterministic factors. Another big difference is that in the software world we get instantaneous scale - up to millions of instantaneous independent trials. Spaceflight advances one costly trial at a time. In the entire history of rocketry, we haven't even begun to approach scale and so all the pretext of safety we could ever elevate is just that - a pretext. It's for this reason that being open about risk and danger is important. It's also why I think aiming for complete safety can be paradoxically harmful. It creates scenarios where open discussion of danger and risk becomes taboo since it can result in negative consequences. The most critical factor in all of this should be informed consent. Making risk taboo goes directly against that.