For a more recent data point, how about NASA’s safety requirements for SpaceX manned flights, circa 2020?
Josh Finch, a NASA spokesperson, told Spaceflight Now that the agency’s calculated “Loss Of Crew” probability for SpaceX’s Demo-2 test flight is 1-in-276, exceeding the commercial crew program’s requirement threshold of 1-in-270.
Would you get in a car if you had a 1 in 270 chance of dying during each trip? Those aren’t great odds for surviving a year’s worth of daily commutes.
what are the chances that being an astronaut is actually safer than driving an hour long commute?
A trip to space is actually about 100,000 times more likely to lead to a fatality than a 20 mile car trip.
People really underestimate how dangerous space travel is.
(The math is in another comment below if you’re curious.)
Good catch! Lost track of my zeros
Are you asking to change the definition of a car trip to the ~500,000 miles it takes to get to the moon and back?
In that case, rate of fatality is around 1 in 200 “driving to the moon and back” trips. 0.5% chance. So taking the rocketship is still significantly more dangerous.
More realistically, 500,000 miles is roughly a lifetime of driving. So these astronauts are being exposed in a single trip to a fatality risk equivalent of 2+ lifetimes of driving.
Or to look at it from a different angle, 5 out of the 413 total manned space flights have ended in fatalities, or 1.21%.
Auto travel in the US has a fatality rate around 1 death per 100 million driven miles. Assuming an average trip of 20 miles, that’s 1 death per 5 million car trips, or 0.00002%.
So, roughly 10,000 (EDIT: actually 100,000, missed a zero!) times more dangerous than driving.
It is massively dangerous.
As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
I get you’re pissed that you have to wait for a train sometimes. I get it, it happens to me sometimes too. But do you really think the railroad crossing in your specific Mississippi town is the barometer upon which all transportation efficiency is measured?
Maybe your town and local trains just suck?
Maybe part of why Lemmy skews older is because this is basically what “old” Reddit felt like.
Before Reddit became the Walmart of internet forums that put all the little guys out of business and gained enough critical mass to have a niche community for every topic under the sun, it was just a quirky place that catered towards tech, politics, and this exact sort of “general everyday discussion” you’re talking about.
I loved that era of Reddit, and I love that Lemmy is providing something that’s close to that experience.
For the sake of argument, let’s use your numbers and say an average astronaut ends up taking a dozen flights on rockets designed to NASA’s 1-in-270 “loss of crew” standard. If that probability holds, then we would expect 4.4% of all astronauts flying in modern rockets to be in a fatal accident during their 12-mission career.
For comparison, lifetime driving fatality risk for American drivers is right around 1%.