"Honestly a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning."
Musk’s frankness here is telling. The Apollo astronauts to the Moon thought they had a 1/10 chance of not coming back. By the standards of today, that is completely unacceptable.
And yet, the impulse to drive risk to zero is paralyzing. Risk is everything. It’s crossing the street, it’s getting on a plane, it’s applying for a new job…etc.
Without risk, nothing happens. If we want to have any hope of saving humanity from an inevitable extinction event here on Earth, humans will die in space. That is a certainty.
"The Apollo astronauts to the Moon thought they had a 1/10 chance of not coming back."
The Apollo risk levels are not something generally appreciated today, even among many space enthusiasts. There was a 1965 NASA assessment of Apollo risks that found that, based upon the current plans and technology, the probability of mission success for each flight was only around 73 percent, while rated per-mission crew safety sat at 96 percent. In fact, though, both astronauts and managers privately thought the risk was much higher in the early Apollo missions. On Apollo 8, Frank Borman thought they had a 1 in 3 chance of dying. When Borman's wife Susan privately confronted Chris Kraft with what *he* thought, he admitted that he thought it was just "fifty-fifty." Even by Apollo 17, I think there's grounds for thinking the LOC risk was closer to 1 in 10 than to that 96% figure of the '65 study.
And even for risk takers like SpaceX, those are not going to be acceptable odds for any Mars program. There is a reason why they plan on having many uncrewed flights of Starship in different configurations before ever putting humans on board, let alone sending any of them to Mars. But the risk certainly is not going to be zero. Going to Mars is not going to be for the faint of heart, not for several generations to come!
"Honestly a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning."
Musk’s frankness here is telling. The Apollo astronauts to the Moon thought they had a 1/10 chance of not coming back. By the standards of today, that is completely unacceptable.
And yet, the impulse to drive risk to zero is paralyzing. Risk is everything. It’s crossing the street, it’s getting on a plane, it’s applying for a new job…etc.
Without risk, nothing happens. If we want to have any hope of saving humanity from an inevitable extinction event here on Earth, humans will die in space. That is a certainty.
"The Apollo astronauts to the Moon thought they had a 1/10 chance of not coming back."
The Apollo risk levels are not something generally appreciated today, even among many space enthusiasts. There was a 1965 NASA assessment of Apollo risks that found that, based upon the current plans and technology, the probability of mission success for each flight was only around 73 percent, while rated per-mission crew safety sat at 96 percent. In fact, though, both astronauts and managers privately thought the risk was much higher in the early Apollo missions. On Apollo 8, Frank Borman thought they had a 1 in 3 chance of dying. When Borman's wife Susan privately confronted Chris Kraft with what *he* thought, he admitted that he thought it was just "fifty-fifty." Even by Apollo 17, I think there's grounds for thinking the LOC risk was closer to 1 in 10 than to that 96% figure of the '65 study.
And even for risk takers like SpaceX, those are not going to be acceptable odds for any Mars program. There is a reason why they plan on having many uncrewed flights of Starship in different configurations before ever putting humans on board, let alone sending any of them to Mars. But the risk certainly is not going to be zero. Going to Mars is not going to be for the faint of heart, not for several generations to come!
Great additional context!