SpaceX wins $440M contract with NASA to develop Space Shuttle successor
It is easy to use superlatives like "safest rocket ever designed".  But a lot of stuff can go wrong - fast - when you're sitting on a big pile of potential explosives that under other circumstances you'd keep a safe distance from.  Until they actually achieve it, you shouldn't throw the superlatives around.<p>I will be the first to applaud if SpaceX achieves this goal.  I am certain that they want to achieve this goal.  But when you look at previous launch vehicles from existing agencies that had over 100 launches, their launch failure rate vary from 1.4% (the Space Shuttle) to 14% (US Atlas) with the Russian Soyuz and European Ariane both coming in somewhere around 5%.  SpaceX would have to improve on existing rocket designs by several orders of magnitude just to get to a pretty crappy safety record.<p>So far SpaceX has had 8 launches with 5 consecutive successes.  The initial failures were clearly part of the learning process.  But their current string of successes does not provide any statistical evidence that they will prove to be safer in the long run than even the worst major rocket program.  Sure they plan to be safe.  But safety is based on seeing what happens, not what they planned to have happen.<p>In this light it is worth reviewing <a href="http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt" rel="nofollow">http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...</a> to see how safe people thought that the Space Shuttle would be.  Initial estimates of the safety of a launch went from 1/100 to 1/100,000 with the riskier estimates coming from lower level engineers and the safer ones coming from upper management.  Whenever you see numbers in the press, it is guaranteed that they represent the view from the top.  We should therefore assume that they will prove to be shockingly optimistic until there is concrete data.