Want to get from point A to point B in one piece? Don't take the shuttle.
By Christopher Mims
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
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As a follow up to my previous post about the likelihood of being killed by various forms of transport, I went and looked up comparable statistics on the space shuttle. Here's how it breaks down: Fatalities per 100 million passenger km: Car: 1.1 Rail: > 0.1 Air: 0.1 Space Shuttle: ~1.9 That assumes that all shuttles have cumulatively logged approximately 718 million kilometers in their many orbits around the earth, and that there have been two lost missions, for a total of 14 fatalities. Fatalities per 100 million passenger hours: Car: 32 Rail: 2 Air: ~35 Space Shuttle: 52,599 That assumes that the shuttle has logged 11,000 days in flight. Anyway, there you have it folks: You're 1600 times more likely to die on a two day space shuttle trip than on a week's hard driving cross-country (assuming you're clocking 8-10 hours a day on the road).
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