You know my first thought was that if I was a widower with two kids I definitely wouldn’t work in a job that dangerous but what are the chances that being an astronaut is actually safer than driving an hour long commute?
what are the chances that being an astronaut is actually safer than driving an hour long commute?
A trip to space is actually about 100,000 times more likely to lead to a fatality than a 20 mile car trip.
People really underestimate how dangerous space travel is.
(The math is in another comment below if you’re curious.)
I feel like the sample size is too low though. I wouldn’t argue that it’s more safe… But a lot of the deaths in space travel were in the early days when we were still figuring shit out and had less sophisticated technology for things like automatic abort systems etc.
For a more recent data point, how about NASA’s safety requirements for SpaceX manned flights, circa 2020?
Josh Finch, a NASA spokesperson, told Spaceflight Now that the agency’s calculated “Loss Of Crew” probability for SpaceX’s Demo-2 test flight is 1-in-276, exceeding the commercial crew program’s requirement threshold of 1-in-270.
Would you get in a car if you had a 1 in 270 chance of dying during each trip? Those aren’t great odds for surviving a year’s worth of daily commutes.
the difference is i doubt anyone will ever fly more than a few dozen trips in the rocket if that
For the sake of argument, let’s use your numbers and say an average astronaut ends up taking a dozen flights on rockets designed to NASA’s 1-in-270 “loss of crew” standard. If that probability holds, then we would expect 4.4% of all astronauts flying in modern rockets to be in a fatal accident during their 12-mission career.
For comparison, lifetime driving fatality risk for American drivers is right around 1%.
I don’t know. If my parent was an Astronaut and they decided to stop being an Astronaut for me. I would hate that, feels like a burden.
You could die working in McDonald’s, at least this way he can support two kids on a single income.
I also choose this guy’s moon crater.
“Hey girls, I know mum died, but I’m going to risk my life flying a rocket to the moon so there’s a significant chance I won’t make it back and you two will have to figure shit out on your own. Bye, daddy’s gotta go, if I make it there I’ll name something after you or something. I left some cash on the table, don’t spend it all on pizza or meth, see ya! Well, maybe hahaha”
Don’t let me go Murph, DON’T LET ME GOOOOO!!!
But also…look what Murph ended up doing for earth in that scenario. Maybe we should off this astronaut and watch what the daughter s do with that traumatizing event.
“Hey kids, I’m going to be gone for 2 weeks… Cause I’m going to the FUCKING MOON! Get dunked on nerds”
Yeah right. 'Cause he’s a stay-at-home dad all year round and just flies to the moon in between for a two-week workation.
I find this claim of “he raises his two daughters” very dubious. I bet he does not have the time to raise that much.
I worked for ESA, I had lunch with ‘just’ ISS astronauts. Their schedule is packed. They need to be in constant training and if they’re not, they have a lot of other duties. They’re barely home. Bet that’s even more true for astronauts flying to the moon.
I understand the PR, it’s good to have role models out there, I hope his daughters understand. But…meh.
I get why you’re being downvoted, but there’s definitely a wee bit of truth in there…
Somehow it’s heroic to abandon your kids who you raise on your own after their mother died to strap your ass on a big ass bomb, to go to a giant rock we already found to be inhospitable and useless 50 years ago. But thanks to the dick measuring contest between billionaires and dictators these days who sell their dumb ideas with fancy CGI promo videos which are total bullshit, we’re doing it all over again. It costs billions, while people can’t pay their rent, food, medical bills.
So I get the downvotes if you’re an American patriot who jerks off to the flag every day, because Americans don’t seem to care about child welfare with all those school shootings and known pedophiles voted Into office. Otherwise it’s just dumb to think this guy is somehow a hero for risking his kids losing both parents. Or that the crater thing makes up for it.
true
Downvoted for being right, by butthurt americans desperately trying to convince themselves that the US isn’t a complete fucking joke
Can you blame uneducated brainwashed narcissistic fascists? Their feelings got hurt. Downvoting is the patriotic thing to do, some even go as far as a dillusional rant as a comment.
Not to be a dick…but imagine a mother putting her two kids who have already lost their dad at a serious risk of becoming orphans
I don’t think it’s that likely surely it’s less risky than driving?
It is massively dangerous.
As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
Or to look at it from a different angle, 5 out of the 413 total manned space flights have ended in fatalities, or 1.21%.
Auto travel in the US has a fatality rate around 1 death per 100 million driven miles. Assuming an average trip of 20 miles, that’s 1 death per 5 million car trips, or 0.00002%.
So, roughly 10,000 (EDIT: actually 100,000, missed a zero!) times more dangerous than driving.
What do the numbers look like if we assume the average trip is from the earth to the moon and back?
Are you asking to change the definition of a car trip to the ~500,000 miles it takes to get to the moon and back?
In that case, rate of fatality is around 1 in 200 “driving to the moon and back” trips. 0.5% chance. So taking the rocketship is still significantly more dangerous.
More realistically, 500,000 miles is roughly a lifetime of driving. So these astronauts are being exposed in a single trip to a fatality risk equivalent of 2+ lifetimes of driving.
this also isn’t taking sample size into account (unless my math isn’t mathing which it very likely isn’t)
Thanks for satiating my curiosity.
100,000 actually.
Good catch! Lost track of my zeros
Ahhhh I see thanks
No, definitely not. Spaceflight is still very dangerous.
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Why did you have to switch the genders to make this absurd point?
Because mothers get vilified for things but when fathers do it it’s heroic.
You’re not wrong. Male CEOs do not get asked how they balance work with fatherhood.
I don’t think mother astronauts get vilified. The first one did back in the 70s, but mothers are constantly going to space. Granted they weren’t single parents.
Like I get what you’re talking about, and you’re not wrong. It’s just a weird topic to inject into this post.
Holy shit the comments ITT
sorry i am too uneducated:
can someone explain what the meme is here?
Text + Picture = Meme
Mods on this sub have no standards
Thousands of men do the same. Why is the guy who’s in a roller coaster amusement park ride the one who gets recognition?
Thousands of men do the same, every day, and they deserve recognition even if they neither want it or get it. Humanity can’t comprehend its own mass, so the occasional exceptional member becomes the focus of attention. This mission is plagued by the politics of American exceptionalism, “been there, done that”, and its own problems. Despite our advances and technology and Hollywood, still isn’t that easy to send a human around the moon.
Humanity can’t comprehend its own mass
If we can’t fathom the billions of miles between the stars, how could we possibly fathom billions of humans existing?
Because all single parents doing their best deserve recognition. We don’t know the other “thousands of men” or hundreds of milions of women names, but we know this one and we give him the recognition he deserves. It doesn’t mean all other doesn’t
Absolute Gigachad!
We could have done the same goddamn thing without any people risking their lives strapped to bus atop a rocket.
We could have tested the safety of a manned mission without people on the manned mission? How in the hell do we do that?
We could have taken picture’s of the moon’s ass.
There is literally zero reason for us to put people in space when we can send drones to do it.
They’re practicing for the future manned landing
Which is fucking stupid and wasteful.
No. If we want to explore the universe and learn more about it, this is necessary. Go watch hank greens video about it. I don’t get why everyone’s malding about science being done.
No, it is not necessary and is in fact harmful.
Humans are not going to explore outer space. It’s way too complicated to keep them fed and alive.
It is way, way easier to send out technology and let it fly as far as it can…without having to support the meatbags.
You guys are the Philistines here, insisting on dragging humans to a non-human event.
It may be, but also…kinda cool?
Godforbid humanity just does something because it’s cool.
There are several reasons to put actual people in to space.
They might be reasons you think worth it, but they do exist.
We already have people in space on the ISS constantly, this manned moon mission is completely unnecessary
Indeed, no scientific studies could ever benefit from a 40% increase in data from test subjects.
Not to mention they aren’t even in the same environmental conditions, or doing the same activities, the data would be completely different (aside from the common baseline of space stuff) and therefore useless for comparison purposes.
I’m not sure why anyone would bother.
Look, i get why you might think it’s unnecessary, i don’t care enough to have an my own opinion on it’s cost/benefit analysis.
All i was saying is that reasons do exist.
You could get 40% more of the same data by increasing output on the ISS with no increased risk of death. The difference in environment between the ISS and the moon is worthless, instead of zero gravity they’re just in low gravity, which we can achieve without even going to the ISS, low orbit would do the trick with even lower risk. This is a publicity stunt to compensate for the US looking like a fucking joke, extra risk for no extra benefit beyond showing off.
All of what you said is reasonable at a glance, still it’s not relevant to my argument.
Reasons exist.
Whether or not the reasons are good is irrelevant to my original argument.
If you’re asking me whether or not i think the reasons are good, my answer is i don’t know and I’m not invested enough in the answer to go looking.
What i will do is put down my uneducated answers to your response.
You could get 40% more of the same data by increasing output on the ISS with no increased risk of death.
Increasing output of existing members is unlikely to be equivalent to data from entirely new test subjects.
40% more data on existing subjects isn’t the same as 40% additional data from new subjects.
For a more equal comparison you’d need to ship new people to the ISS and then your argument would only be true if there was zero risk of death in getting new people to the ISS.
The difference in environment between the ISS and the moon is worthless, instead of zero gravity they’re just in low gravity, which we can achieve without even going to the ISS, low orbit would do the trick with even lower risk.
That’s subjective but you could be right, i’d possibly argue that the combination of factors in space in addition to the low gravity would be different than a terrestrial equivalent, so a low gravity experiment in the ISS might be a better comparison.
I don’t know enough to be certain about any of that though.
This is a publicity stunt to compensate for the US looking like a fucking joke, extra risk for no extra benefit beyond showing off.
Possibly, i’d guess likely, but again i don’t know enough to have a reasonable opinion on this.
They’re there to gather data on the moon’s surface and how being on a manned mission affects the human body.
We already have pictures of the dark side of the moon, so the intention this time was for the human eye to view it, since it gets much more detail anyway.
They’ve been testing the effects of low gravity on the human body in the ISS the whole time, they absolutely do not need to send people to the moon for that. Everything they’re doing right now could be done by an unmanned mission.
You can’t have humans observe the far side of the moons without humans
Cameras exist
Nothing anyone says will convince you since you clearly decided you were against this, no matter what.
Logic didn’t cause this opinion, so logic won’t convince you.
But it’s super cool.
We already did that with Artemis I, this is a test flight for manned flights to build a base and explore further
Yeah watched this live and man it was hard to work the rest of the day.
