alt Hacker Newsfor human spaceflight we want a lot more than "likely" (>50%). The standard is usually "extremely likely" (~1/100 to 1/1000 chance of failure)
Replies
irjustin • today at 6:02 AM
1/100 is absolutely terrible. Shuttle had 1.5% failure rate. Bonkers.
[edit]
For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
➕ show 1 reply
Maybe. What was the probability of Loss of Crew during Apollo? There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. Indeed, that was one reason given for cancelling the program.
The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today?
In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.]
My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.