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> sounds like the sayings of someone who has not ever seen a 50% of death

Well, this sounds like simple ad-hominem. I appreciate your insight, overall, though.

Many ideologically-driven people, like war field medics, explorers, adventurers, revolutionaries, and political martyrs take on very high risk endeavors.

I would also like to explore unknown parts of the Moon despite the risks, even if they were 50%. And I would wholeheartedly try to do it and put myself in the race, if not for a disqualifying condition.

There is also the matter of controllable and uncontrollable risks of death. The philosophy around dealing with them can be quite different. From my experience with battlefield medicine (albeit limited to a few years), I accepted the risks because the cause was worth it, the culture I was surrounded by was to accept these risks, and I could steer them by taking precautions and executing all we were taught. No one among the people I trained with thought they couldn't. And yes, many people ultimately dropped out for it, as did I.

Strapping oneself to a rocket is a very uncontrollable risk. The outcome, from an astronaut's perspective, is more random. I think that offers a certain kind of peace. We are all going to die at random times for random reasons, I think most people make peace with that, especially as they go into old age. That is a more comfortable type of risk for me.

Individuals have different views on mortality. Some are more afraid than others, some are afraid in one set of circumstances but not others. Some think that doing worthwhile things in their lives outweighs the risk of death every time. Your view is valid, but so is others'.

> Stepping “in the arena” with odds like those, I’d say the vast, vast majority will back out and/or break down sobbing if forced.

Something like 10 million people will accept those odds. Let's say 1 million are healthy enough to actually go to space and operate the machinery. Then let's say 99% will back out during the process. That's still 10,000 people to choose from, more than enough for NASA's needs.

50% of the time doing something that has a one percent chance of killing you 69 times will kill you

> No offense but this sounds like the sayings of someone who has not ever seen a 50% of death.

The space program pilots saw it. And no, I would not have flown on those rockets. After all, NASA would "man rate" a new rocket design with only one successful launch.

Using the space shuttle program as a comparison, because it's easy to get the numbers. There were 13 total deaths (7 from Challenger, 6 from Columbia [0]) during the program. Over 135 missions, the Space Shuttle took 817 people into space. (From [1], the sum of the "Crew" column. The Space Shuttle carried 355 distinct people, but some were on multiple missions.)

So the risk of death could be estimated as 2/135 (fatal flights / total flights) or as 13/817 (total fatalities / total crew). These are around 1.5%, must lower than a 50% chance of death.

This is not to underplay their bravery. This is to state that the level of bravery to face a 1.5% chance of death is extremely high.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions

If I recall correctly, the Saturn V was man rated after one launch. There were multiple failures on the moon missions that easily could have killed the astronauts.

The blastoff from the moon had never been tried before.

Spooky graph that illustrates the risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-25C_Titan_II#/media/File:U...