Rocket Safety Quotes

Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It's absurd.

Solid-fuel rockets can't easily be shut down on command.

When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.

Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent.

Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.

No one knows how to make going to orbit orders of magnitude safer and orders of magnitude more affordable.

The truth is, every single rocket launch off of planet Earth is risky.

The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.

You can picture pretty easily if there were a paying passenger aboard a rocket that failed, like Challenger failed. Certainly it would be a tragedy, and a tragedy for the company. They would have a hard time recovering from it.