Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

OSUfan88 t1_jamu519 wrote

Reply to comment by AdminsFuckedMeAgain in After flying four astronauts into orbit, SpaceX makes its 101st straight landing — ‘I just feel so lucky that I get to fly on this amazing machine.’ by marketrent

It's slightly complicated, and depends on how you measure.

Many consider the Falcon 9 Block 5 to currently have the lowest chance of failure of any rocket. That being said, An earlier version had a failure on ascent (and 1 more on the pad testing).

Atlas V has never had a total mission failure, so you can't get better than "100% mission success". That being said, it has had some partial failures. People can debate the semantics of whether it is or not, and depending on which metrics they find most important, be correct. It can be said that it's an EXTREMELY safe rocket in it's current form.

edit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/11fyw2y/falcon_landings_are_now_more_reliable_than_any/

Here is an awesome post which makes the case that Falcon 9 landings are now more reliable than any rocket ever. The basis of this is that Falcon 9 has successfully landed 101 times consecutively. The highest any non-SpaceX rocket has had success launching is the Delta II, with 100 consecutive successful launches.

16

Bewaretheicespiders t1_jamwrro wrote

Atlas V would have a pretty tight confidence interval on that 100% reliability yeah.

With that number of flight there is only a 0.6% probability that Atlas' V "actual" reliability (partial or total success, were it to fly an infinite number of time) is less than 95%

So if I remember my Stats correctly, and its been over 20 years so bear with me, we can say with 99% confidence than Atlas V's is at least 95% reliable?

6