As of November 7, 2023, a total of 676 astronauts, cosmonauts and space tourists, including 73 women, have traveled to space. Obviously, the number of disasters that result in deaths will affect the cost of insurance for space tourists.
On this subject, Nigel Packham, Deputy Director of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA, based on the information available to him (we know the difficulty of obtaining information from China and the former USSR in this area), counted 21 accidents resulting in in case of death (excluding ground accidents).
Find our series at behind the scenes of staying in space.
Five space missions, three by NASA and two by the Soviet Union, were marked by fatal accidents.
These tragedies are often the result of a mix of unusual circumstances, material and human error, and sometimes political and managerial decisions.
– In January 1967, a soil test before the launch of Apollo 1 caused a fire aboard the capsule, killing the three astronauts present.
Reason : fire caused by an exposed electrical wire causing a spark inside the cockpit to the left of astronaut Gus Grissom.
– In April 1967, the Soyuz 1 capsule crashed to earth.
Reason : parachute malfunction, killing the occupant on board. The space race and politics are partly responsible, with the launch being held despite the capsule’s non-operational state to coincide with a political event: the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution.
– In June 1971, Soyuz 11, after detaching from the orbital station, fell back to earth, the three Soviet astronauts from the mission were then discovered dead in their capsule, after an apparently successful landing.
Reason : brutal decompression of the cabin, whose pressure drops in a few seconds from 760 mm of mercury to 7 mm.
– In January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch, killing its crew of seven.
Reason : the unusual harshness of the climate at Cape Canaveral is to blame, colder than expected, which has made certain O-rings less flexible. A hot gas leak eventually caused an explosion.
– In February 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry into the atmosphere, causing the deaths of its seven occupants.
Reason : During Columbia’s launch, a piece of foam insulation broke off and damaged the leading edge of one of the shuttle’s two wings, which was then unable to withstand the high temperatures of reentry.
Note that there were no fatalities during the main mission phase, in orbit or towards the Moon. The fatal accidents all occurred when leaving Earth, returning to Earth, or during an exercise on Earth.
Human spaceflight therefore recorded 21 tragedies out of about 650 people who flew into space. Although we have to put things in perspective, because we are only at the beginning of space tourism, the ratio is still very high, even too high, as it is approximately 45,000 times higher than that of commercial aviation!
It may be a paradox, but it is like this: without insurance, space tourism will not be able to develop as much as it would like.
