The shuttle also killed more people in spaceflight than any other space vehicle in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
By contrast you have a fatal airplane crash in the order of 10,000,000s flights.
Space fight is a lot more dangerous than normal in-planet transportation, and the Space Shuttle is on the more risk side of it (but any project has too small numbers to generalize).
Planes glide, and are generally only unsafe during a few critical moments after tire-lift.
Planes that don't glide are generally considered unsafe and highly specialized.
I fail to wrap my head around how a mechanism that uses active propulsion for all phases of flight could ever match the safety of a mechanism that exploits passive physics in the face of active propulsion system-failure.
That said, I couldn't tell you how to achieve space-flight otherwise except for maybe a shuttle-lander type system -- I am simply stating that the comparison of risk between air travel and space travel seems absurd to me.
Of course space travel would be more dangerous.
I get your point but things become normalised over time and mechanisms/technology invented to deal with the risk and conditions. If you'd said to people 150 years ago that there would be (well pre-covid days) at any one time about a million people at 30k feet flying around in basically a tin can, journeying across the world in a day, they'd say you're mad and it's too dangerous to achieve. They didn't have the technology capable, like a jet engine or fabrication techniques. Maybe in 50 years we do have a new technology that meets the crtieria needed, maybe not, but the same happened before and I'm sure it'll happen again.
So, rockets have had almost a century of development too. You could even stretch that and claim more like 6-700 years, as the Chinese had "one of the world's earliest multistage rockets and ballistic cruise missiles" around the 14th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huolongchushui