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I think something is wrong with your math. 23 out of 535 Mountaineers is indeed 4%, but its over the course of 1968-1987. So that's an actual rate of 0.2% per

I think something is wrong with your math. 23 out of 535 Mountaineers is indeed 4%, but its over the course of 1968-1987. So that's an actual rate of 0.2% per year (1.2 deaths per year). You need to do the same math with space travel---dividing the # of deaths by the # of years space travel has been in existance. But to apply a notion from finance, space travel is such a small 'market' that its liable to fall prey to black swan events---e.g. maybe space travel is very very safe or very very dangerous, but the data set we have is non-typical and we'll start seeing 'typical' data once we ramp up to 100,000+ people per year travelling in space.

dalke 15y ago
I including the number of years in the calculation. I wrote "which is 4% or 214/100K per year". That latter number includes dividing by 20 years. Specifically, "23/535 / 20 * 100000 = 214.9" or 215/100K (oops! I rounded down instead of to nearest). Similarly, with 50 years of human space travel, 35 deaths/450 people/ 50 years * 100000 people = 156 deaths / 100,000 per year. I don't know why I wrote "151/100K", I meant to write "150/100K" and not be so precise. In any case, it looks like the source I used wasn't that accurate. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#Percentage_of_fatal_spaceflights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc... for better details. I quote from there: "About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death percentage rates. Except for the X-15 (which is a suborbital rocket plane), other launchers have not launched sufficiently often for reasonable safety comparisons to be made." That implies that there is enough statistics. In any case, I recall Feynman's essay about the Challenger explosion. He recounts how one person estimated Shuttle disasters as being about 10x safer than the more common unmanned ones, which works out to something like 1 out of every 50-100 Shuttle launches. Thus, other observations help strengthen the possibility that this isn't a black swan event.

dalke 15y ago

I including the number of years in the calculation. I wrote "which is 4% or 214/100K per year". That latter number includes dividing by 20 years. Specifically, "23/535 / 20 * 100000 = 214.9" or 215/100K (oops! I rounded down instead of to nearest). Similarly, with 50 years of human space travel, 35 deaths/450 people/ 50 years * 100000 people = 156 deaths / 100,000 per year. I don't know why I wrote "151/100K", I meant to write "150/100K" and not be so precise. In any case, it looks like the source I used wasn't that accurate. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#Percentage_of_fatal_spaceflights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc... for better details. I quote from there: "About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death percentage rates. Except for the X-15 (which is a suborbital rocket plane), other launchers have not launched sufficiently often for reasonable safety comparisons to be made." That implies that there is enough statistics. In any case, I recall Feynman's essay about the Challenger explosion. He recounts how one person estimated Shuttle disasters as being about 10x safer than the more common unmanned ones, which works out to something like 1 out of every 50-100 Shuttle launches. Thus, other observations help strengthen the possibility that this isn't a black swan event.