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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

Was there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.

You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.

Never risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years

Yeah, and where is it now?

The next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.

2/156 lost for Soyuz in 59 years, 2/135 for Space Shuttle in 30 years. Same rate. People often underestimate how intense STS actually was.

The 2 were early, and fewer lives were lost. The shuttle was unnecessarily risky , and NASA was aware from its inception

Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?

Orion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.

Yeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know anything about Orion then. SLS is very crappy and disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, + its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit, but it will probably work.

I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.

Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.

Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.

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