The Apollo astronauts did know that the risk of a failure was high. But before the first Shuttle failure there was wishfull thinking of a much smaller risk of failure than possible.

If you only have four or five vehicles which cost billions of dollars each, crewed by people who are considered to be national heroes by a lot of folks, having an accident will make the news.

@OrganicMarble but by definition you’re only a hero if you’re taking up massive amounts of risk?

As I've said here before... " A much larger fleet flying many more missions would have vastly increased the experience base and perhaps reduced the political impact of accidents. If an F-16 crashes, it makes the news, but it's not a national tragedy, and the Air Force doesn't grind to a halt for years while it's investigated. The shuttles we got were treated as national treasures and their low flight rate and extreme cost made the experience base small and the opportunities to improve them scanty." space.stackexchange.com/a/24215/6944

"if the Challenger disaster was treated as a cost of doing business, the Space Shuttle program might've still been operational." yeah, uhm, nope. The Space shuttle program was far too expensive, which is what actually killed it. (The disasters were just a way of doing it without the bad PR of killing a legendary program)

High profile humans dying in spectacular accidents will always be treated as a big deal by the media, even if the chances of it are understood to be relatively high.

Echoing Organic Marble, this question is based on the flawed premise that safety effort is invested because humans are onboard. Much of the effort happens because the vehicles and payloads themselves are irreplaceable (as in taxpayers will not buy another one, not that another could not be made). So possibly your observation is more with the politics and process that leads to one off payloads in the first place, rather than the planet lab/starlink approach of building cheap, flying cheap and everybody accepting some % need to be replaced.

Can you evidence the "implicit assumption that space travel must be safe" statement? I think the reality is the exact opposite - everyone knows it is risky and accepts that whilst trying to minimise the risks as much as possible.

@deep64blue then why was the Challenger disaster a big deal? Shouldn’t everyone have just shrugged and said “oh well, let’s try again next year”?

Not at all - one can accept something is risky but still react strongly to the loss of human life and investigate to see what lessons are to be learnt.

@JonathanReez The Challenger disaster was a big deal for a huge number of reasons. First US loss of life during a NASA mission. One of the lives lost was the teacher selected in the widely publicized “Teacher In Space” program, and her students were watching the launch live (along with many others). Unexplained (until later) catastrophic mission failure. Total loss of a space shuttle. Then the political and engineering fallout from the investigation into the cause of the disaster. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster

It’s hard to tell if you’re genuinely not horrified by any death or you’re trying to make some point by just ignoring the horror that most other people experience at the death of astronauts. Space travel is a societal and human endeavor and current human societies are highly motivated to work hard and spend a lot of time and money to try to make the number of deaths involved be zero. In other words, death is bad. How is space travel “helped” by making it more horrific and more bad by letting it be more deadly. Seems obvious that would hurt space travel, not help.

It's still worth to mention, that despite the dangers of spaceflight, it's still very safe due to all the effort invested in making it safe. It's safer than sea travel was during the Age of Discovery! The very first circumnavigation of the planet in the 16th century lost 80% of the vessels and 90% of the crew on the way! And they still sent out more ships afterwards. (imagine how quickly any space program would have been cancelled if they had similar casualty ratios) Also, the message delay was measured in months, yet people still conducted business across oceans for many hundreds of years!

I don't understand your question. Nobody assumes that space flight must be safe. We want it to be safe because if space flight had a fatality rate of, say, 20% only suicidal people would be astronauts (and they wouldn't be good astronauts). So we need space travel to be safe otherwise it is useless.

@ToddWilcox Yeah... I'm not sure if we're being trolled or dealing with a monster.

@ToddWilcox To be fair, the idea that an early death is a tragedy that should be avoided at all costs is not universal in all philosophies. For instance the Vikings would have thought that those poor astronauts died a glorious death and will dine in Valhalla, and they deserve more respect that people living a long life and dying peacefully at home. Were they monsters? Or did they just have a different belief system? (I'm playing devil's advocate here.)

@T.J.L. there’s absolutely nothing monstrous about the idea that humans should be able to volunteer to put their lives at great risks for the sake of humanity, especially if we’re talking about a tiny group of individuals.

"why was the Challenger disaster a big deal?" - In both the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, NASA acted with hubris by ignoring things that they shouldn't have. For Challenger is was ignoring the the evidence from Morton Thiokol that the O-rings might fail due to the cold temperatures, and for Columbia it was treating foam from the main fuel tank falling off during launch as "normal". In the case of Challenge, they expressly ignored the engineers, and put pressure on the MT executives to sign off on the launch.