A rocket launch is a very violent thing to experience. If you're months away from being dead, there's a good chance the G forces during launch would be too much for your body to deal with.

There's a lot of vibration, but the G forces are not that high, and they are particularly low during launch. The highest G force is right before the main engines cut off, once the rocket is already in space, at which point you presumably don't care anymore...

For falcon 9 you don't even reach 2G until more than 60 seconds into the flight when the engines throttle back up after passing through max Q.

Acceleration graph: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-23ba4a3fe7f535430bed80... (from https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-acceleration-of-a-Falcon-9)

The passenger would feel one extra 'g' from gravity itself. Meaning it would reach a total of 4.5G, which is substantial.

Not without the ground pushing back against them, they wouldn't. Turn off the engines and the passengers feel weightless (because both vehicle and pax are accelerating earthward at 1G); therefore turn them back on @3.5G and they'll feel 3.5G, no?

That acceleration graph starts at 1G and goes up to 4.5 Freefall is 0G. The G force we feel is the difference between gravitational acceleration and our motion towards the center of gravity, so most of our lives we experience 1G. The complication is that gravitational acceleration doesn't feel like acceleration so remaining stationary in gravity does.

Really?

Old people are fragile, but a rocket launch is <3G [0], they could choose a gentle launch profile, and it's a nice constant force pushing you back into a nice padded seat.

What damage is it actually going to do in the very short term (which is all we care about in this scenario).

[0] https://i.redd.it/c05xe7b5infx.jpg

Still beats going out in a bed plus all the burial, cremation etc.

I think that could be a major funding source for a Martian or Lunar colony. I could see people opting to live in low gravity if the accommodations are decent and the alternative is spending the rest of their life in a wheelchair.