From Jakob Pape
Dundee
I was in general impressed by the tone and content of your editorial
concerning the safety of space flight (5 July, p 3), but I do feel constrained
to point out an error of arithmetic.
If “several hundred humans have followed Yuri Gagarin into space, and 11 have
died”, as the editorial states, then the death rate is not “at least 1 in 10”.
It is at most 1 in 20, and possibly considerably less, depending on exactly how
many hundred humans have been up.
Though this is still no small risk, the colonisation of America cost a great
many of the colonists their lives too, and few people think that those deaths
should have dissuaded later colonists from trying. I personally know a fair
number of people who would gladly take this kind of risk to colonise space.
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