Those comparisons make no sense and are just plain wrong.
First point: When looking at safety we care about injuries and deaths, not the launch failure rate. A broken parked car might not be reliable but it certainly is safe. Don’t confuse reliability and safety.
The two are certainly related – but not one and the same. The biggest problem with the Space Shuttle, for example, is that there is no plan B (most of the time). If you have a launch abort system you can decrease the reliability of your rocket (and thus change the failure rate for the worse) while still being just as safe.
Second point: It just makes no sense to compare manned and unmanned launch systems. Bringing Atlas and Ariane in the mix just makes no sense at all. You can’t meaningfully compare the safety between those launch systems and the Shuttle, if only because it’s impossible for humans to be injured or killed in those rockets.
On a deaths per humans brought to space metric the Shuttle is a horrible performer and very unsafe.
You are right, I was confusing reliability and safety.
That said, we currently have little reliability data on various SpaceX technologies, and no safety data at all. They are doing everything they should do to make those numbers good, but until those numbers come in we won't know what to think of them.
First point: When looking at safety we care about injuries and deaths, not the launch failure rate. A broken parked car might not be reliable but it certainly is safe. Don’t confuse reliability and safety.
The two are certainly related – but not one and the same. The biggest problem with the Space Shuttle, for example, is that there is no plan B (most of the time). If you have a launch abort system you can decrease the reliability of your rocket (and thus change the failure rate for the worse) while still being just as safe.
Second point: It just makes no sense to compare manned and unmanned launch systems. Bringing Atlas and Ariane in the mix just makes no sense at all. You can’t meaningfully compare the safety between those launch systems and the Shuttle, if only because it’s impossible for humans to be injured or killed in those rockets.
On a deaths per humans brought to space metric the Shuttle is a horrible performer and very unsafe.