Yeah, this is what I don't get. People do drugs, skydive, go sailing and do 150 MPH on motorcycles for fun, but they can lose their shit if 1 in 100 dies going anywhere in space...

I guess it will change with time...

Because the costs of putting people in space are huge, so you need correspondingly huge buy-in. Dangerous recreational activities only appeal to a tiny minority of people (while quite a lot of people take drugs recreationally, most do so fairly cautiously rather than in heroic quantities or contexts a la Hunter S Thompson).

With space travel, it's both expensive and inaccessible other than to those who could be regarded as among the 'best and the brightest,' and whose loss is felt disproportionately. A better contrast might be that we (in the US) have a moderately high tolerance for deaths in war, because the bar for entry into military service is not so high. But if you recall the early days of the war in Afghanistan, there was a big freakout over the death of Corporal Pat Tillman, who abandoned a promising career as an NFL quarterback to serve his country post 9/11 and then died in a friendly fire situation during combat. It's very hard to become quarterback in the NFL so his death was considered a great loss, even though morally it's no different from the deaths of thousands of other soldiers. So deaths on a Mars mission would provoke a reaction of 'why are we sending our best to die in the cold wastes of space/on the surface of distant planets when we have perfectly serviceable robots?'

I think the way it will change is if privately financed asteroid mining becomes a practical reality, in which case deaths in the line of work will be considered tragic but acceptable (within reason), much like deaths on oil rigs and other high-risk industrial environments.

The "freakout" around Pat Tillman was because he was killed by other US soldiers and the military tried to cover it up.

A great deal of the value to a manned mission to a planet, in terms of tangibles, exists in coming back. Humans can take samples easily, and a return mission would bring them back. Humans would significant contaminate any site they visit, and drones can be considerably more sterile, not to mention cheaper.

When you are talking about spending many, many billions for a single mission, arguably the success of the spacecraft is worth more than the lives of the humans. If the crew is at a significant risk of death, and it is worth noting that a lot of these risks would affect the crew mostly evenly, then the whole mission is in jeopardy.

It's not possible to justify the very high price we pay for human safety within the space program based on value to the mission. If it were only a matter of the mission, we would accept tremendously more risk. Human lives are only valued at a but under $10 million, so even for a 10-person mission to Mars the value of the humans is < 1% of the cost of the mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...

Because of the diminishing returns to safety spending, it's generally better from an economics perspective to accept an order-unity chance of failure and just send multiple missions. But obviously, this is not how we design human space travel.