Safety, Reliability and Accidents
See also: List of spaceflight-related accidents and incidentsThe reliability of rockets, as for all physical systems, is dependent on the quality of engineering design and construction.
Because of the enormous chemical energy in rocket propellants (greater energy by weight than explosives, but lower than gasoline), consequences of accidents can be severe. Most space missions have some issues. In 1986, following the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, American Physicist Richard Feynmann, having served on the Rogers Commission estimated that the chance of an unsafe condition for a launch of the Shuttle was very roughly 1%; more recently the historical per person-flight risk in orbital spaceflight has been calculated to be around 2% or 4%.
Read more about this topic: Rocket
Famous quotes containing the word accidents:
“The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)