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The shuttle also killed more people in spaceflight than any other space vehicle in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_

The shuttle also killed more people in spaceflight than any other space vehicle in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#During_spaceflight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

adrianN 6y ago
What's the ratio of killed people to transported people?
- barbacoa 6y ago
  2 total failures, 135 flights, so 1 in 67 flights resulted in everyone dying. By contrast you have a fatal airplane crash in the order of 10,000,000s flights.
  - _joel 6y ago
    ... after a century of development
    - HelloMcFly 6y ago
      + both space shuttle crashes should not have happened. There were people involved in both circumstances ringing the alarm bell and warning of the likelihood of the outcome. Those were not failure of technology, they were failure of culture and courage (though in the case of Columbia, I'm not sure what the rescue plan would have been).
    - serf 6y ago
      given the inherent danger of space travel, I don't think the risk will ever meet parity with air travel. Planes glide, and are generally only unsafe during a few critical moments after tire-lift. Planes that don't glide are generally considered unsafe and highly specialized. I fail to wrap my head around how a mechanism that uses active propulsion for all phases of flight could ever match the safety of a mechanism that exploits passive physics in the face of active propulsion system-failure. That said, I couldn't tell you how to achieve space-flight otherwise except for maybe a shuttle-lander type system -- I am simply stating that the comparison of risk between air travel and space travel seems absurd to me. Of course space travel would be more dangerous.
      - _joel 6y ago
        Everything is harder or more dangerous that's not been done. Otherwsie it would have been already, right? I get your point but things become normalised over time and mechanisms/technology invented to deal with the risk and conditions. If you'd said to people 150 years ago that there would be (well pre-covid days) at any one time about a million people at 30k feet flying around in basically a tin can, journeying across the world in a day, they'd say you're mad and it's too dangerous to achieve. They didn't have the technology capable, like a jet engine or fabrication techniques. Maybe in 50 years we do have a new technology that meets the crtieria needed, maybe not, but the same happened before and I'm sure it'll happen again.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      "Modern rockets originated in 1926 when Goddard attached a supersonic (de Laval) nozzle to a high pressure combustion chamber" So, rockets have had almost a century of development too. You could even stretch that and claim more like 6-700 years, as the Chinese had "one of the world's earliest multistage rockets and ballistic cruise missiles" around the 14th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huolongchushui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huolongchushui
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    The rate of 1/10,000,000 is for commercial regular aviation. Private fights have a much larger rate, usually even larger than 1/1,000,000, what is a normal rate for civilian transportation (a few times more or less). Space fight is a lot more dangerous than normal in-planet transportation, and the Space Shuttle is on the more risk side of it (but any project has too small numbers to generalize).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

adrianN 6y ago

What's the ratio of killed people to transported people?

barbacoa 6y ago
2 total failures, 135 flights, so 1 in 67 flights resulted in everyone dying. By contrast you have a fatal airplane crash in the order of 10,000,000s flights.
- _joel 6y ago
  ... after a century of development
  - HelloMcFly 6y ago
    + both space shuttle crashes should not have happened. There were people involved in both circumstances ringing the alarm bell and warning of the likelihood of the outcome. Those were not failure of technology, they were failure of culture and courage (though in the case of Columbia, I'm not sure what the rescue plan would have been).
  - serf 6y ago
    given the inherent danger of space travel, I don't think the risk will ever meet parity with air travel. Planes glide, and are generally only unsafe during a few critical moments after tire-lift. Planes that don't glide are generally considered unsafe and highly specialized. I fail to wrap my head around how a mechanism that uses active propulsion for all phases of flight could ever match the safety of a mechanism that exploits passive physics in the face of active propulsion system-failure. That said, I couldn't tell you how to achieve space-flight otherwise except for maybe a shuttle-lander type system -- I am simply stating that the comparison of risk between air travel and space travel seems absurd to me. Of course space travel would be more dangerous.
    - _joel 6y ago
      Everything is harder or more dangerous that's not been done. Otherwsie it would have been already, right? I get your point but things become normalised over time and mechanisms/technology invented to deal with the risk and conditions. If you'd said to people 150 years ago that there would be (well pre-covid days) at any one time about a million people at 30k feet flying around in basically a tin can, journeying across the world in a day, they'd say you're mad and it's too dangerous to achieve. They didn't have the technology capable, like a jet engine or fabrication techniques. Maybe in 50 years we do have a new technology that meets the crtieria needed, maybe not, but the same happened before and I'm sure it'll happen again.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    "Modern rockets originated in 1926 when Goddard attached a supersonic (de Laval) nozzle to a high pressure combustion chamber" So, rockets have had almost a century of development too. You could even stretch that and claim more like 6-700 years, as the Chinese had "one of the world's earliest multistage rockets and ballistic cruise missiles" around the 14th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huolongchushui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huolongchushui
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  The rate of 1/10,000,000 is for commercial regular aviation. Private fights have a much larger rate, usually even larger than 1/1,000,000, what is a normal rate for civilian transportation (a few times more or less). Space fight is a lot more dangerous than normal in-planet transportation, and the Space Shuttle is on the more risk side of it (but any project has too small numbers to generalize).
deleted 6y ago
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