According to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

The current statistical fatality rate for astronauts and cosmonauts is 3.2 percent. Lets give Blue Origin the benefit of newer tech and learning from previous mistakes and say they're twice as safe as any other spacecraft. That's still a 1.6% chance you'll die taking a flight in it.

Except blue origin isnt in the same order of magnitude as Gemini, Soyuz, Dragon, etc.

How many people have died in suborbital rockets with low apogees and barely any down range movements?

Numbers just aren’t there to reasonably draw any conclusions

> How many people have died in suborbital rockets with low apogees and barely any down range movements?

The three astronauts of Apollo 1.

That was a ground fire of an orbital vehicle

The rocket itself was clearly suborbital at the time.

Does that rate also hold for flights using the same model or even the same vehicle as tested in previous flights? Shouldn't testing bring the rate down?

You know that the pandemic has been going on too long when my first thought was "oh, that's about as (un)safe as getting Covid" :(

Then again, NO ONE has died during space travel since 2003.

As any tech matures, it becomes safer. Early flying was a death circus. Now it's the safest way to travel of all.

It's hard to say where on the "getting safer curve" space travel is with so few data points. But it just might be pretty good. Time will tell!

Sure, but the average car trip doesn't span millions of miles and last for months. If you compare deaths per passenger-mile, space travel is safer than cars (but more dangerous than airplanes).

Because Shatt's space trip was relatively short and quick, he's fairly safe if you extrapolate from the statistics. Of course that extrapolation might not be reasonable for various reasons:

* There's only been one deadly space incident in the last 30 years, so we don't have a very good sample size

* Not all passenger-miles are equally dangerous. Leaving and returning Earth are the most dangerous parts of space travel. However by not going to orbit, Shatt didn't have to leave Earth as quickly, nor did he have worry as much about a speedy reentry.

* Most of those passenger-miles were done on vehicles that have a launch heritage than New Shepard

Per mile biases in favor of high speeds though.

It would be interesting to do a comparison of deaths / travel time. Challenger exploded 73 seconds into flight.

> * There's only been one deadly space incident in the last 30 years, so we don't have a very good sample size

The Shuttle program lost 2 out of 135 flights over its 30 year life.