[TChad]

1.5% failure is a rate that no sane person should find close to tolerable. It's murder.

I bet that most or all of the astronauts would have chosen to fly even with certain knowledge that they had only a 98.5% chance of coming back alive.

[bvw]

Assisted suicide is still suicide.

[GreyMountainReagan]

The 1.5% was for shuttle flights as a whole.

This particular flight it was ~30%

[Soul of the South]

The mortality rate for Air Force and Navy test pilots in the 1950’s was much higher than the the astronauts in the space program have experienced. Consider also the mortality rate for early explores venturing across the Atlantic in the 1500’s from Europe to the Americas or the pioneers moving west in the early 1800’s. There is unfortunately risk in exploring the unknown.