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Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Soviet/Russian space program has a much better track record than the US: the US accounts for 15 of 19 spaceflight fatalities, and 9 of 11 training or test fatalities (including 1 for Virgin, not NASA).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

In fairness, the US has flown around 2.5x more people into space, but the Soyuz also ferried a whole lot of them up and down.

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> the US accounts for 15 of 19 spaceflight fatalities

That’s skewed though because the US craft had more people on board. The two shuttle accidents killed 14 astronauts while the two Soyuz accidents killed 4.

In terms of number of fatal incidents they are even if you discount the X-15, or pretty close if you don’t.

Surely the Soviets deserve some credit for never designing and continuing to fly something as hysterically unreliable and dangerous as the Shuttle?

Although you do have to wonder how the Buran would have fared if it has survived the Soviet collapse.

Does the training or test fatalities include 3 for the Apollo 1 fire? If counting ground-based accidents, it seems incomplete to leave out the Soviet N-1 explosion that killed more than all the other incidents combined.

(published fatalities, the same way a jammed tunnel with thousands of cars recently flooded and the official death toll in all of China was 53.)

I hate to disappoint you, comrade, but the "lost cosmonauts" have been pretty thoroughly debunked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts

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