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> Even the most reliable launch vehicles (Falcon 9, Atlas V) are probably not more than ~99% likely to succeed. Falcon 9 is it at this point. All of the remain
by nordsieck 4y ago
> Even the most reliable launch vehicles (Falcon 9, Atlas V) are probably not more than ~99% likely to succeed.
Falcon 9 is it at this point. All of the remaining stock of Atlas Vs and Ariane 5s have been sold.
Of course Vulcan and Ariane 6 will come online soon; buy they don't have anywhere close to the safety record that Falcon 9 does.
I'm not a statistician, but I wouldn't be surprised if Falcon 9 had better than 99% chance of success. It has more than a 150 long success streak. And no rockets in the current configuration have ever failed.
> Can we convince this segment of the population that launching a small device (with necessarily less shielding) is safe?
This isn't obviously no to me. NASA has launched a bunch of RTGs in the past. Those have the same sort of safety concerns in the event of a failed launch. Probably less material, though.
- lisper 4y agoThose were launched in a different era with a very different political climate.
- Ankaios 4y agoThe RTGs weren't launched in a different era. The most recent RTG went up less than three years ago. (On Perseverance.)
- lisper 4y agoI stand corrected. I thought all the rovers were solar powered. My mistake.
- Ankaios 4y agoMost of them have been, but Perseverance and Curiosity were exceptions. I believe the original motivation was for Curiosity to be able to land at higher latitudes.
- lisper 4y agoYeah, I actually knew that. Just had a brain wedgie/senior moment. (Seems to be happening more and more as time goes by. Funny how that happens.)
- xyzzyz 4y agoIf p is the probability of success, then probability of 1500 successes in 150 independent trials is p^150. With p = 0.99, the chance you see 150 successes in a row is 0.22. If we take significance level to be the standard 0.05, then we cannot reject the hypothesis that the chance of success of Falcon 9 is less than 99%. We can, however, reject the hypothesis that it's less than 98%: if it was 98%, then in 150 trials, probability of all successes is 0.048, which is smaller than 0.05.