What a fun time to be alive, I've been hoping for this step for a long time now, reusable rockets will greatly improve our access and exploration of space and should allow some great leaps in our species progression. It makes me wonder how many years from now until rocket launches to space like this will seem like today's commercial airline travel.
The Martin M-130 was the main plane Pan-Am used to establish the first cross pacific passenger service. Three were built exclusively for Pan-Ams cross pacific service started in 1936, offering one flight per week.
The Hawaiian Clipper disappeared in the pacific with all hands in 1938. PanAm also used the Sikorsky S-42 on shorter legs, one exploded in mid-air in Pago Pago same year. The other two Martins crashed with heavy fatalities in 1942 & 1945, 100% loss rates. Pan-Ams ten Sikorskies had at least five fatal accidents for a 50%+ loss rate.
They were replaced by the Boeing 314, 12 were made, 3 crashed for a 25% loss rate. They were all taken out of service by Pan-Am quickly after WWII, so Pan-Ams total fatal accident rate for its seaplanes was around 45% in only about 13 total years of service for all types.
Despite this Pan-Am was hugely successful at establishing profitable ocean crossing passenger flights and changed the world doing it.
People will take a lot more risk to reach new worlds, if we only let them.
Assuming each plane flew 1-3 times a week, for 13 years... That would be 600-2000 flights. If half the planes crashed, that would give them a failure rate of 0.1-0.025%.
The Space Shuttle (Also a second generation vehicle) had a failure rate of 1.5%.
The Souyz (Widely considered to be the most reliable launch system, with a successful launch rate of 97.3%) had 2 accidents which killed everyone on board - out of 136 launches. Also a failure rate of ~1.5%.
Your estimates are a bit off. Each plane didn't fly for 13 years, on average they flew 5 or 6 years. And the pacific routes were only once a week until the first crash, and Pan Am didn't replace it, just flew the route 3 times a month.
Edit: The pacific route was nearly a week long, so obviously if you count each leg separately percentages were better, but passengers had to fly every leg to reach their destination, unless they wanted to be marooned on a remote island.
And your failure rates are backwards looking. Flying boats before 1938 certainly had even worse safety records than post 1938, so the first passengers on Pan Am flights had worse safety expectations. Counting legs separately would be like saying the Shuttle actually made 270 trips, 135 up and 135 down.
The Falcon 9 and Heavy are likely far safer than the Shuttle, which was a clearly unsafe design, from the rube goldberg melding of solid and liquid rockets to a crew cabin with no abort systems, and unproven reentry shielding on a shape that accentuated the dangers of its use.
Falcons are a refinement of proven launch technologies, combined with a much safer crew compartment with excellent abort features and using proven reentry shielding/shape. Odds are it's far safer than the shuttle.
Only 10% of Magelleons crew survived the circumnavigation of the world, yet explorers lined up to follow. If SpaceX offered rides to Mars with a 20% chance of death, there would be a waiting list of hundreds of thousands of people.
In reality it shouldn't be too hard to reduce launch safety risk by a factor of 10 from historical launches. The Dragon capsule can almost add that improvement by itself.
> Rockets have, and will continue to occasionally explode.
Will they? I don't know a tonne about rockets, but maybe as we reuse them it will make sense to make more expensive rockets that do not explode since we're going to be reusing them. At least for crewed missions.
The rocket equation is highly unforgiving. Even minor structural reinforcements, with a minor increase in vehicle mass, have disastrous consequences on the amount of payload you can carry into orbit.
At full thrust, a Boeing 747 produces ~90 MW of power. At full thrust, the Saturn V produces 166 GW of power. It's a staggering amount of energy - there is no way to make it 99.9999% safe (Which is where air travel is currently at.)
There's also payload fraction - the useful weight that your vehicle can carry. In the case of a Boeing 747, 50% of its weight is useful cargo. In the case of a Saturn V, 4% of its weight is useful cargo. [1] Rockets are incredibly wasteful.
There are two changes that make the situation less dire for SpaceX.
1) It's Dragon capsule has an amazing emergency escape system that can operate safely during most (if not all) of the launch and ascent. It can escape and land with the Draco boosters on the capsule, but also has parachutes to provide safety redundancy.
2) The fuel to launch the first stage of a Falcon 9 only costs a few hundred thousand dollars. So while mass fraction is still low, the cost is potentially as low as a few million for each first stage launch/refurb cycle.
Given second stages cost a fraction of what the first stage does, it's not necessary to re-use second stages to have massive potential savings.
Having an emergency escape system is table stakes. The fact that the Shuttle didn't have one was a serious design problem.
The Souyz also had an escape system. That didn't stop one crew from decompressing, and another from pancaking into the ground (Because of a parachute failure.)
Depending on when the accident takes place, the Dragon will require both parachutes, and retro-rockets to land.
> The fuel to launch the first stage of a Falcon 9 only costs a few hundred thousand dollars. So while mass fraction is still low, the cost is potentially as low as a few million for each first stage launch/refurb cycle.
Only a few hundred thousand dollars (Discounting all labour costs... Which will not go away) to send three people to space and back.
For that much money and fuel, American Airlines can send a thousand people around the world, and throw in a soda for free.
Around the world isn't space. Space costs of anywhere near $1M a person would open a huge market.
Edit: An example is that a price of $30M per seat created a market of 1 commercial space traveler a year in the decade of the 2000s ( and with a risk of life expectation of nearly 1% ).
The Dragon 2 has 7 seats, if re-usable Falcon 9 flights drop below $30M range, you potentially have $5M a seat flights (depending on Dragon costs and number of crew members). And they likely could fill every one of those seats.
