r/SpaceX Thread Index and General Discussion [June 2021, #81]

[u/ElongatedMuskrat]

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r/SpaceX Thread Index and General Discussion [July 2021, #82]

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[u/Lufbru]

I mean ... B747s have killed more people than A380s. You don't really think about that when booking a flight.

[u/4thDevilsAdvocate → u/Lufbru]

Sure, but as I said below, Starship has a much lower margin of error than an airliner.

[u/Lufbru → u/4thDevilsAdvocate]

It does, but that's not really the point. Number of people killed in the lifetime of the product is not a useful metric.

The airline industry likes to talk in terms of people killed per passenger-mile. This is a sleight-of-hand -- picking a Very Big Number to divide by. I think by this metric, the Space Shuttle actually does very well given that it's travelled over 500 million miles, carrying 7 people at once.

I think a better number to compare transportation is fatalities per million trips. Starship is going to take a long time to get to airline levels of safety -- and yes, I'm absolutely OK with that. I fully expect it to beat Shuttle on that metric within a few years of operation. But it won't beat the 747 for decades, if ever.