Rocket Safety Risks

Historically rockets not infrequently blow up. NASA can find specially trained astronauts to risk a 1% chance of death to push forward human progress but how many people will put up with a 1% or even 0.1% chance to save a few hours flying?

Safety isn't as much determined by your aspirations, as it is by your record. 37% failure is an acceptable milestone considering all the SpaceX has achieved in its short lifetime, but I doubt would satisfy NASA's safety regulations for human spaceflight.

Space launch is risky, not just perceived as risky, actually risky. rocketry isn't one of those 5 9's of reliability activities.

Considering NASA has a 50 percent loss rate on their space shuttles and SpaceX hasn't lost anyone yet I don't think it's a problem.I'm surprised that people are losing their minds over a few explosions as if the US government didn't blow up hundreds of rockets in order to get a working product.

Not really, SpaceX would just sell that as an unscheduled disassembly + “we collected data”.It’s widely accepted that you may die going to space in experimental vehicles, nobody ever said it would be safe, and nobody can reasonably think it is risk-free.Apollo 1 folks died, not a problem for reputation of NASA.

NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.https://x.com/eager_space/status/1879291376418120184

I guess it depends on what you mean by significant. It's true that, inherently, space flight is risky business.[0] This is new technology, so of course they are going to continue to uncover weaknesses even much further down the line once they start hitting a higher success rate.But for the tiny bit of imperfect: the same could have been said for the space shuttle, and that had people in it. And its fragility was a fundamental to its design (it rode exposed on the fuel tank with its criti

Rocketships are insane, there has to be many many fail safes because failures happen all the time. I remember a NASA engineer giving a talk on engineering safety when I was going to school where he said that the probability of catastrophic failure in NASA's launches is 1 in 100 and that is as low as they are able to make it at this point in time.

What does "definite" mean? Greater than zero? That's useless here. Either you made it to orbit or you didn't. Either you're pregnant or you're not. Either you are alive or you are dead. There is quite a lot of binary stuff happening in the universe, and none of it relies on things like "0.24% likelihood". SpaceX's record is abysmal, and you forgot a few facts.1) Soyuz is a government project with the pride of a nation at stake. SpaceX is a personal project with the pride of an egomaniac at st

Rocket flight would have to get a lot safer before that ever becomes a reality. Nobody is going to sign up for that if they have a 1 in 270 chance at rapid unscheduled disassembly. And even that rate hasn't been demonstrated to date - the risks for both Space X's rockets and NASA's space shuttle have so far been higher.