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Want to get from point A to point B in one piece? Don't take the shuttle.

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).