Not to mention there were certainly other problems with Apollo like mission 13, or 11 barely landing before running out of fuel (computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute). Ultimately though Apollo was just too big and expensive a program to maintain, for better or worse.

... Also, there was Neil Armstrong's ejection from the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in 1966:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle

(And I see another test pilot, Joe Algranti, also had a very close call flying a second-generation LLTV -- ejecting 0.6 seconds before it crashed!)

NASA came very close to losing more astronauts during mission prep for Apollo, in addition to the Apollo 1 crew. (Even if we leave aside the four astronauts killed in T-38 crashes in the 1960s.)

> computer problem forced Armstrong to take manual control and find a new landing spot at the last minute

The computer kept flying the machine despite the interrupts and reboots due to the radar switch that Buzz had left on. It was really marvelously designed to be able to keep on executing its highest priority tasks.

The reason for the (semi) manual control was that the designated landing spot was a boulder field. The computer kept on operating the throttle.

Source: Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal.

For what its worth - and not necessarily to draw parallels with the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 mishap - Russia successfully launched an unmanned Soyuz rocket and Progress 57 cargo ship with supplies for the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, hours after the catastrophic explosion destroyed a similar mission in the United States.[1]

The cargo ship was expected to and successfully docked with the ISS later in the day.[2]

[1] Russia Launches ISS Cargo After US Craft Explodes

http://www.voanews.com/content/russia-launches-iss-cargo-mis...

Russian supply ship poised for launch Wednesday

http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/10/28/russian-supply-ship-poi...

[2] Russian Progress M-25M docks with the ISS

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/10/russian-progress-iss-...

Not exactly. The computer worked as designed. If they hadn't left the docking radar on, it would not have had any 1201 or 1202 alarms. A bunch of big rocks is why Armstrong took over.

True. But it is almost pointless to compare these two programs since Apollo was so much more complex.

To put it in perspective, Apollo flew on a rocket with five engines producing 1,500,000 lbf thrust each, on the first stage alone. By contrast, the Virgin motor produces 60,000 lbf thrust for 70 seconds.

The Apollo program had a safety culture configured so that if anyone identified a safety issue, they became responsible for the problem and responsible to sign off that it was corrected.

Speaking of perspective, the Apollo was fully-backed by the government of the most powerful economy in the world at the time - 4% of the federal budget was directed towards it, with 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 third-party employees, with a cost of ~$140B of today's dollars. How the hell is a private company supposed to compete? Not even Apple's famed $100B in cash could pay that bill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_p...

Edit: It's also worth noting that the same entity that ran the Apollo missions currently has no way of putting people into space, and the last system they had also looked like a plane... and had problems with exploding and killing people.

Another difference, the Apollo astronauts carried slide rules to do calculations during the mission.

They had slide rules in addition to the most sophisticated digital computers of the time. Both, in the spacecraft and on the ground.

"True. But it is almost pointless to compare these two programs since Apollo was so much more complex."

That's funny, because you were the one who compared them first.

"Almost pointless" due to the vast differences in scale and complexity but still worthwhile, as a contrasting example of a solid safety culture employed by the Apollo engineering and operations teams.

Although the Virgin 60,000 lbf rocket is small by the standards of Apollo, it is still an extremely challenging problem. There are no problem-free or inherently safe options, so safety needs to be engineered in from the bottom up carefully and competently. Otherwise, failures like this will not happen just once.

The engineers involved would do well to study the Apollo program and other successful complex engineering efforts such as nuclear reactors, as well as the counter examples of the two space shuttle that were lost due to management putting schedule ahead of safety.

If there are no inherently safe options, then that tends to preclude engineering in safety. I really don't think you know what you are talking about.

A propulsion system that was "inherently safe" wouldn't have dangerous failure modes. Although Virgin has tried in the past to paint their hybrid prolusion system as being "inherently safe", it isn't. No 60klb rocket engine is. To make any such system operate safely and reliably is a big engineering challenge. I think you don't understand the meaning of the term "inherently safe" in an engineering context.

Could you define it for me then?

Yes, and to bolster your point, they halted the program to re-evaluate safety. I think it's a human fault that we have to learn from our mistakes - unless we make them, people just don't believe the risks are real.