Honestly I think you would find thousands of volunteers to do space exploration with a much higher risk than we are willing to entertain today.

I sometimes wonder just how much we are handicapping ourselves as a civilisation with the risk averseness we take to some tasks while being pretty blase about others where the reward is nowhere near as high.

I doubt it's about what the astronauts themselves would consent to. It's about congressional hearings, what the talking heads on MSNBC and Fox News would say, and what all of that might mean for the lives and careers of many thousands of additional people who have no intention of going into space themselves.

I suspect the risk avoidance is simply a political necessity. In the US, ever since the Apollo program ended NASA has to fight for their budget, they can't afford highly public deaths for fear of entire programs being cancelled.

Meanwhile Russia's space program is mostly noteworthy for being a reliable launch provider with one of the most reliable rockets ever built. With no budget for bigger ambitions and little competition until recently there was no incentive to change anything.

I would argue the bigger handicap is the resource constraint for large projects - from lack of funding as well as lack of resources since the major sources Of taxable income (Amazon, Apple, etc) don’t pay tax.

Resources are a choice. Nobody ever did a cost-benefit assessment for the trillion dollars of Iraq war.

(Arguably the space programme worked as a proxy war with the Soviet Union; America didn't want to let the Russians ""invade"" the moon first.)

Apologies - not sure I understand. But I think I agree that societies choose how to distribute their resources?

ISTR the acceptable risk statement for the Apollo program was that there be no more than a 20% chance of losing a crew.

NASA lost the Apollo 1 crew in the pad fire, nearly lost the Apollo 13 crew, and lost a bunch more astronauts to plane crashes in the early days. They also nearly lost the Gemini 8 crew during the docking accident, and nearly lost Gus Grissom when the hatch cover pyros blew unexpectedly after his Mercury capsule splashed down. (On the other hand the attrition rate among test pilots in the 1945-1975 era was sky high.)

Then there was the Shuttle, which was supposed to have a less than 1% chance of losing a crew and managed to kill 14 astronauts in 130-something flights (and had a couple more very close calls).

Even the best/safest crew launch vehicle to date -- Soyuz -- killed four cosmonauts (on Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11) and had a couple of extremely hairy launch aborts and uncontrolled ballistic re-entries.

TLDR: nearly 60 years after Gagarin's flight, human space vehicle launch and re-entry is still extremely dangerous. (Living on a space station: somewhat less so, but still not as "safe" as the crew of a nuclear submarine.)

> Then there was the Shuttle, which was supposed to have a less than 1% chance of losing a crew and managed to kill 14 astronauts in 130-something flights (and had a couple more very close calls).

That seems like a misleading way to frame it. It was 14 astronauts out of 833 who flew, or 2 crews out of 130, so 1.5%. Not far off the estimate. And with that high a percentage, a number close calls are also expected.

I thought all of the Nitrogen gas sounded much more dangerous. It's scary easy to die from nitrogen suffocation without even realizing anything is wrong until you're basically unconscious.