One Of 7 Ways A Trip To Mars Could Kill You

One of 7 ways a trip to Mars could kill you

1) Your rocket could blow up before leaving Earth

Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars involves strapping a giant spaceship atop the biggest rocket that humanity has ever built. Because any rocket launch basically involves a long, controlled explosion, it’s inherently precarious — no matter how many safety tests are done beforehand. If anything goes wrong, if the explosion gets out of control, the people strapped to that big container of fuel don’t stand a chance.

For context, NASA’s space shuttle program carried 833 passengers between 1981 and 2011. Of those, 14 people died in explosions on two high-profile accidents (Challenger and Columbia), a fatality rate of 1.6 percent. That’s vastly more dangerous than driving and a bit riskier than climbing Mount Everest. (The fatality rate for the Apollo program to the moon was even higher, at 9 percent.)

But, of course, SpaceX would be using newer, more complex, and yet-untested rockets to get to Mars. So it’s tough to say what the actual odds of death would be. Possibly much higher! Note that a couple of SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets have either exploded on the launchpad or blown up mid-flight. Engineers and rocket scientists can improve that, but it’s unlikely that the risk will be zero.

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I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

Elon Musk

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