SpaceX Explosions might be “normal” if you’re an engineer behind the scenes, but if you’re someone dreaming about space tourism? That’s straight-up terrifying.
I’m really starting to feel like I’ll miss out on space travel right when it finally becomes real. And honestly, I’m broke, so even if it was secure , I probably couldn’t afford it.
Would you ever want to try SpaceX cosmic travel? What do you think a fair price would be for something like that?
That recent SpaceX explosion was wild. I think I’ll be postponing my cosmic travel dreams for now.
byu/Either-Meaning1786 inspace
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I couldn’t stop saying WOW! And I watched it over and over
Sitting atop a vessel with wafer-thin safety margins with very few safe-fail modes, is always going to be risky.
Space travel exists – plenty of folk have paid and flown to altitude, and some to orbit.
The risks will come down, as will the price – just as every mode of transport has shown.
But will it every be as safe as airplane travel?
Probably not – the energetics are fundamentally higher.
<walking is less hazardous than running, etc.>
I used to fantasize about it, but as i got closer to the reality, i learned there is no real value for personal tourism. It takes a substantial environmental cost to get resources into space. Its only responsible engineering if those resources add more value than they consume.
I wouldn’t go just for that, maybe if they ever build a space hotel or something. The risk and cost isn’t worth it just to go up and come right back.
The reality of space travel right now is it’s extremely uncomfortable and somewhat dangerous, as well as expensive. It’s definitely not for everyone.
Dragon is much safer than Starship, but NASA’s target for a loss-of-crew incident for that is 1 in 270, and while it ought to have a decent margin, there haven’t been close to enough missions to say how likely it is to meet or exceed that figure empirically.
At this point I’m willing to bet that Elon pushed the Starship team too far in the payload ratio specification to make Starship look as attractive as possible to investors – and they’ve shaved their engineering safety margins far too thin as a result.
They’re just hitting almost random disasters each time, and that speaks to an overall design that’s cutting corners and weight *everywhere*, and when you do that in a complex system like a spacecraft, the chances that one of those systems will fail on any given flight becomes non-negligible – and that’s all it takes.
Chemical rockets will NEVER be affordable enough to allow middle class individuals to travel to space. We need something fundamentally different and that probably won’t happen this century. Explosions or not.
Sure, I’d try it, but it would take hundreds if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of successful flights before I’d even consider it.
I don’t mind being an early adopter of a new tech, but not one that’ll kill me if it fails.
I don’t think I’d have gotten into an airplane until the 1960s tech came along either, and even then, I’d have been a bit nervous.
It should be conditional before another dime goes to this project that Elon Musk is on the next flight. Show some confidence in your use of taxpayer dollars, big guy!
You better off catching a ride on a Dragon to a private space station.
I would never ever sit in a spacecraft designed and built by people who think “move fast and break things” is cute. People who will lose jobs of they don’t move fast enough and don’t break enough things.
Have you ever wondered why Elon’s never gone up?
Just a set up. They can’t get the fuel line leak fixed because these are all from the same iteration and we’re already in production when the first one blew up. They purposely lowered the cargo for the second one (knowing it would fail) and this one they just blew up on the pad because it’s easier, more cost effective, and zero chance of debris falling somewhere that’s going to draw more FAA attention.
id fly on it once they fly 100 missions without blowing up like the falcon
Perfect for when you want to go to space and can’t make up your mind which direction to go.
Just wait a bit,China will make it for half the price
I’d judge the rocket I might fly on by the performance of the rocket I might fly on. I mean, consider just SpaceX. They are clearly having trouble getting Starship to work properly. On the other hand, the Falcon 9 Block 5 has launched 435 times and failed once. It doesn’t really matter how much Starship is blowing up. What matters is how much whatever rocket I would be riding is blowing up.
The thing about Space Tourism is that by the time I might ever have a possibility to do it, whatever I would be riding on would have launched hundreds or more likely thousands of times already (for space tourism to get cheap enough to be viable for middle class people, you need high launch volume). So there wouldn’t really be any mystery about how safe it was. It’d just be statistics.
I am 25, I hope I get to see people start transiting between Earth and the moon or at least LEO space stations in my time. I would love to see manufacturing move into space and would love to look at earth from space before I die. I figure once I am like 75 years old there is a pretty good chance its a reasonable ask… if we don’t all kill ourselves before then.
I dont get why we using rocket fuel to go to space since whole-ass stars, planets and moons seem to be there without it.
Well, it’s still a test vehicle.
Humans won’t be going on board for a long time yet, until it’s an actual “product”, released, validated, reliable.
At the moment it’s barely an alpha release
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|[COPV](/r/Space/comments/1lfhrm6/stub/myoianv “Last usage”)|[Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_overwrapped_pressure_vessel)|
|[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1lfhrm6/stub/myofwhc “Last usage”)|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1lfhrm6/stub/myoi4l9 “Last usage”)|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
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^([Thread #11463 for this sub, first seen 19th Jun 2025, 19:13])
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Look up the history of these issues for space travel in general. It’s super scary to think about, but car travel, planes, and everything else follows the same learning process… usually paid for in blood.
Personally I like my spaceships to explode on the ground during prototype phase, and not in space while I’m in them.
Sure, it’s a major setback. However it likely revealed a flaw which would have taken years and a fatal accident to be discovered if things were slightly different.