Vostock, Voskhod, Mercury, Gemini and SpaceShipOne all have clean records. Some pilots were killed flying trainer jets, but not in the space vehicles. Valentin Bondarenko was a Vostock program pilot, killed after a fire in training, but not in the spacecraft itself.

I think you meant understeer.

The launch escape system on the Saturn V wouldn’t have worked though. Maybe during the later phases of the launch, when an explosion would have had less energy, but the Shuttle could do a RTLS then also.

Occam’s razor, it works! ( except when it doesn’t )

I actually think it’s pretty impressive that the other pilot didn’t die. He fell a long way.

That Sänger spaceplane was not intended as a bomber. It was designed starting in the 1960s specifically as a spaceplane.

SpaceX claimed that the payload adapter failed to detach the spacecraft properly and that the Falcon 9 performed optimally.

The one that blew up on the pad counts as a failure too. It doesn’t have to be in flight to fail. Besides, if you limit it to launches alone, Columbia isn’t a launch failure either, but a re-entry failure.

It still sort of works.

The Space Shuttle definitely had it’s issues and they don’t begin or end at insufficient launch abort capability.

That’s a dangerous choice. I hear Dr. Huxtable was secretly a prolific date rapist.

Pretentious might be a better word for him, but yeah.

It even makes unrelated figures related for narrative purposes.

I honestly didn’t know this guy was still around.

Comparing Falcon 9's development to rockets from 20 or more years earlier isn’t exactly a 1:1 comparison as all relevant technologies have advanced significantly in that time. Compared to other comparable domestic systems whose development was at least partially in this century:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah-blah blah blah blah blah yada-yada blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah yada-yada blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah PSYCHIC blah blah blah.

I’m not saying the criticism of Spaceship Two, or other piloted systems is unwarranted. It’s an apples/oranges comparison with the Dragon 2 anyway.

They do a lot of experimenting with new hardware and new procedures on customer launches, losing one rocket during fueling because they didn’t adequately test a new procedure and another in-flight because they didn’t have strenuous enough testing requirements for components.

They don’t know that their crew vehicle is reliable. They’ve never used it.

I didn’t define it, I just used it. I didn’t even say why it was weird. Weirdo.