So maybe bundling all flights together for the Soyuz would give you something like a 0.3% failure rate but there are a lot of caveats that would have to go along with that number for reasons like above. There are other small variations in the crewed and uncrewed rockets that could have affected the launch history.

- Ben H.

He died in the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967.

Any space exploration fatality should be considered a failure and the engineers should do everything in their power to correct the mistake. But some risk is inherent and must be accepted or we will not accomplish amazing things.

- Ben H.

I remember reading that one of the Apollo astronauts, maybe Buzz Aldrin, was asked about the risk factor and whether he was concerned. He said he was pretty sure he’d come back alive, but wasn’t so sure the mission of landing on the moon could be accomplished successfully.

It seems like Russians could’ve gone and back from Mars easily if only they had NASA’s budget instead their own.

Its like buying a brand new luxury car vs. buying an old model city car and having the same number of breakdowns, depending on how you look at the numbers, earning a minimum wage, to go to the same place.

Not trying to start a political argument, I’m not a commie or something like that. Just willing to put things into perspective, just for economy’s and science’s sake.

So, depending on how you look at the numbers, the Soyuz and Space Shuttle safety records are fairly similar in some ways.

Fair point. I was factoring in the number of people who had died using each system, but, as you say, the failure rate in terms of failures per launch is lower for Shuttle than for Soyuz, unless you count all the other launches (such as Progress launches) of systems related to Soyuz.

If you play Devil’s Advocate, you could state simply that no other launch vehicle has killed 14 people, but this fails to acknowledge that Shuttle had the largest crew capacity of any space vehicle yet made.

With the ISS construction complete, it’s hard to justify the Space Shuttle since there were no major mission profiles left for it to support. As Kappy said:

“It’s complete overkill for simple crew transport to ISS.”

The logical step, from an engineering perspective, would be to retire the aging Shuttle fleet after the ISS was complete and use the lessons learned in the last 3 decades to move forward and design a new exploration system that fits the mission profiles that we want to do next – which would likely be two-fold – ISS crew transfer and deep space exploration. These two niches are very different and would likely require different vehicles, but could feasibly be done by the same vehicle. All of this is exactly what the Constellation program aimed to accomplish. It was the next logical step.

Of course, politics and money are always a factor and have played a major role in the decisions that were made. In my opinion the Space Shuttle program should have come to an end sometime between 2010 and 2015 but I think we have messed up the next step a bit and it’s going to take some work to recover.

This is all just my opinion of course.
- Ben H.
Mission Control, Houston, TX

Although given their past record of consistent successful launches hardly unexpected.

Space travel, like mountaineering, like motor-racing, like sky-diving and so many other things that people love to do is intrinsically dangerous and always will be. Life generally is dangerous and no leaves it alive.

In the end we all die of something. Personally I’d rather it wasn’t Alzheimers & old age and I think that goes for an awful lot of other folks too incl. most of the astronauts who volunteer to go into space because its what they deeply wish to do.

You either decide to take the risk – as minimised as it reasonably can be but no more – or you sit at home and wait to die after a lifetime spent risking and doing nothing. I fear today we have become far too risk-averse and afraid of taking the risks that mean we are boldly going and boldly exploring where none have gone before.