1- Reed, I would also fly either of those spacecrafts, no questions asked.

2- I don’t think Soyuz is a marvel, and Shuttle a mousetrap, but ……….

3- ………….I don’t think either that Soyuz is a “second class, unreliable spacecraft” and the shuttle a first class untouchable marvel.

4- I think politics and science should not mix, ussually it gives us bad results.

5- The Nasa ground crew accidents are well documented, I would have to look for the paper about Hidrazine leakages, but those are there (by the way, I meant ground crews, by mistake I wrote astronauts as I was thinking about the last of the Apollo’s flights when Deke Slayton’s crew got one of those leaks (1975 ? ), that was also documented, as almost anything else on Nasa’s program……………… even Alan Bean being almost knocked out by his own Camera.

6- Statistics by itself don’t use to be reliable (using Napoleon Bonnaparte words “You can use statistics as it pleases you”), looking by the numbers the safer spacecrafts flown would be the early series in the 60’s (Vostok, Mercury and Gemini) that never had a fatal accident.

7- What defines “seriosly injuries” ? I recall my old army Seargent that considered anything but losing a limb as a “minor injury”, my sister in law considers anything bigger than a paper cut a big wound.

8- The point I always wanted to make clear is that we should keep an engineering eye on the question, machines do have problems, and they must be fixed. LET’S NOT START A WITCH HUNT.

Best regards

Christian Maciel

Therefor, if you fly on either vehicle, your chances of dying (based purely on historical failure rate) are about 1:50.

The fact that more or less people will live or die with you should an accident occur says nothing about the safety of the vehicle, it’s purely a product of how many they carry. If soyuz flew as many people as the shuttle, it would have to fly more than 2x as often, and assuming the same failure rates, it would kill as many people.

Again, you are claiming if a van and a car have exactly the same chance of crashing and killing everyone on board, the van is more dangerous. That is utter nonsense.

@Reed
“By your (and Christians) logic, an airliner that could carry 200 people and crashed once in 1000 flights would be less reliable than a light plane that carried 2 people and crashes once every 100 flights.”
Chance of dying for one people in airline would be 1/5. Chance of dying one people in plane is 1/50. And note that I NOT said “more/less reliable”. I said “more/less dangerous”. So while by succesful flights airliner wins, it is clear that still their safety solutions are well, bad.

BTW your example is different than soyuz and shuttle. Shuttle is even more dangerous, because number of flights are close, number of catastrophe falures are same, but more people died.

Summary:
Saying that machine that killed 14 people is equally safe as machine that kills 4 people only because both killings occured in two accidents for each machine and each machine preformed close number of runs is pure, extracted and ratified BS.

If you wanted to talk about how reliable a car was, you’d measure it based on mileage or time run, not by how many people it could carry. By your (and Christians) logic, an airliner that could carry 200 people and crashed once in 1000 flights would be less reliable than a light plane that carried 2 people and crashes once every 100 flights.

I’m not saying Soyuz is bad. Statistically, it’s comparable to, or better than any other vehicle flown. It’s a great machine, and a credit to the people who build an operate it, especially when you consider the budget and other conditions they have to work with. Give me a chance of riding on the Shuttle or Soyuz, I’d jump on either one. I’m just sick of people repeating the myth that Soyuz is especially reliable, when it is clearly unsupported by the evidence.

Christian Maciel
Do you have documentation of shuttle astronauts being injured in flight or landing ? I know ground crews have been killed and injured in various incidents (as they have in other countries programs) but I’ve never heard of astronauts being seriously injured on a mission (excluding Challenger and Columbia obviously)

The suttle killed a total of 14……………… against 4 of soyuz.

The Soyuz capsule has been upgraded and modified acording to the needs of the moment.

There is quite limited capability to modify the shuttle ………………..

The Soyuz capsule fullfills its design proposal (cheap and reliable capsule), something quite far from the shuttle that was designed to work around the clock and ended up being what is called in the aircraft industry as a “hangar queen”.

So, if you want to have something to get men in space in order to work there the best still soyuz.

By the way, there has been a lot of incidents in the US space programs where astronauts where injuried, due to design failure, lack of care and several other problems (at least 5 hidrazine contaminations have been reported after shuttle landings).

A point well given is that the shuttle has shown design limits quite limited on safety, making several potencial failures prone to major failure.

It fells like the Soyuz is an old jeep, its rough to ride, bad to drive, uncorfortable and limited, but it takes you wherever you need to go.

My dream would be to have two crafts, another reusable shuttle mode in acordance with Nasa’s original design (that was about half the size of the actual one) using russian’s hipergolic fuels in the boosters, and an upgraded soyuz using a lot of Apollo’s solutions.

That’s my two cents, I think our future may lay in space, and it won’t come from one country, but from a planet where we learn to use the best expertise and solutions from everywhere instead of keep saying “my spacecraft is better than yours”.

I am planning to go to one of the next shuttle launches, I was a ten years old kid when it was first launched, and I still thinks it is a technological marvel, but we have got to get something better there or it will be a waste money, time and resources.

Best regards

Christian Maciel

And one more thing. Anyone with common sense will use actual number of casultaties instead of strange, unheard unit called “crews”.

Well, anything (including statistic cheating) to fulfill agenda that safety of shuttle == safety of soyuz, eh?