Yes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to)

But if I'm allowed to repeat myself from elsewhere in the thread and the meat of the above thing,

It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't.

We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive, as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff.

People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time.

The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth.

And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability.

Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out.

"As of 1 April 2026, there have been five incidents in which a spacecraft in flight suffered crew fatalities, killing a total of 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts.[2][how?] Of these, two had reached the internationally recognized edge of space (100 km or 62mi above sea level) when or before the incident occurred, one had reached the U.S. definition of space at 266,000 ft, and one was planned to do so. In each of these accidents, the entire crew was killed. 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."

[wiki link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...).-,During%20spaceflight,fatality%20rate%20at%202.4%20percent.)

I suspect that it is NOT a weaker system than before, it is more accurate about the mortality rate. In other words, there are fewer "unknown unknowns" than there were in the 60s and 80s, partially because of explosions that took out previous astronauts.

(Some would snidely say as long as they don't put seven people on the rocket they'll be fine.)

1 out of the 12 crewed Apollo missions resulted in the death of the crew, so a 1 in 12 effective mortality rate.

Apollo 13 was a very close call. If that had ended in failure the mortality rate would have been 1 in 6.

So 1 in 30 would be a pretty clear improvement from Apollo, and we are a lot better and more thorough at modeling those risks and testing systems than we were during the Apollo program.

Space is hard. If we didn’t accept these parameters we wouldn’t go to space. Apollo lost one entire crew and almost two, the Space Shuttle lost two missions where the whole crew died. The risks are real.

It honestly says something about how absurdly risk averse our society has become that an 1/30 chance of death is considered too high for a literal moonshot. You can advertise a 1/3 rate of slowly choking in vacuum and I bet you will still get a five mile long queue of people signing up for the mission.

If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 returned.

Actual death rate for astronauts so far is 19/791, or 1 in 40.

It's unclear if the shuttle was actually safer or if NASA is just more honest about the odds of catastrophic failure.

There are reasons to think Artemis is safer. It has a launch abort system that the shuttle lacked. Reentry should also be much safer under Artemis; the capsule is a much simpler object to protect.

We stopped going to the moon because it's a vanity project. It's expensive, risky, and there isn't much more science to do or that can't be done by robots.

You are comparing orbiting earth in a shuttle to a lunar flyby in a pod. Very different risk profiles.

Crossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space.

And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.

> That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before

how do you keep past performance while stop performing it for XY decades?

overall construction in the US had a measured death rate of 1 in 1000 people in 2023. i think we can accept far higher rate for space travel.

This was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are

That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?

Better to document risk, than lie to brave volunteers. And they knew the risk, and wanted to go. So I see zero issues here.

You cannot really determine what the risks are before trying something new.

Turns out riding on top of controlled explosions is a risky engagement.

That was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture.

I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.

Come on! No one is forced to get on the rocket. If you don’t think it’s worth it, don’t go!

From a social perspective, I would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.

If we got to a point where going to the Moon was significantly safer than that, we’d better start trying things even more ambitious and risky or we’ll stagnate as a species. The fatality rates for circumnavigating the globe or settling in North America or attempting to invent a working flying machine were much, much higher than that.

The shuttle didn’t accomplish that much and didn’t get us as far as Artemis just did, the risks are well worth it. Nobody is forcing the astronauts to do their astronaut thing, imo they’re aware of the risks they’re taking, and kudos to them for that.

Wai how is it weaker, like genuinely?

Eh yeah? This is frontier, pioneer stuff. We should have a greater appetite for risk as long as it’s completely transparent and the astronauts know what they’re getting into. Realistically though, there is essentially a rocket a day going up and they rarely fail anymore, so the true risk is probably much lower than 1 in 30.

There are over 8 billion people on earth.

Insane to you? why don't you tell us what you have contributed to the world to improve this outcome even if by .01%