[KellyAdmirer]

The cold, brutal facts after over 100 shuttle launches say about a 2% chance of death each time you fly. They can spin it all they want, those are the rough odds. May not sound like much, but many of these guys go up multiple times, and that percentage can grow pretty high with career astronauts. Dicing with death. Those folks earn their pay.

[theFIRMbss]

>Dicing with death. Those folks earn their pay.

It's worth asking why?
Ocean-going explorers
brought back tangible,

bluntly real rewards--
new lands to settle, new goods,
new markets. Real things.

What real difference
have the lives and deaths of brave
astronauts brought us?

(Oher than serving
as romantic figureheads
for scum bureacrats.

I just don't see what
value the current NASA
gives America.

I'm a science fan.
And I love technology.
But NASA, to me,

just doesn't appear
to be doing anything
worth these dreadful deaths...)

[monkey]

It's not a stationary process. After a failure they presumably learn something, and are less likely to fail in the same way again. This is true of a catastrophic failure, or a minor failure that doesn't affect the mission. Note that by calculating the odds right after a failure, your method is highly biased.

A better way to calculate (even rough) odds would be by doing time between failure analysis, i.e., looking at how many flights until the first failure, and how many flights between the first and second failure, etc.

[185JHP]

They get more than money - they get paid to do what they enjoy doing. Kinda like LEOs - "money for nothin', and the kicks for free!"