Originally Posted by
Excargodog
And technology doesn’t necessarily change that. ‘Firsts’ are hard.
A total of 355 individuals flew on the space shuttle over its lifespan. 14 of them died. That’s a Shuttle astronaut/cosmonaut rate of damn near 4% DESPITE the best technology and the best minds available and a budget of $209 Billion. And that was in then-year dollars...
Bad analogy. Shuttle, like everything NASA, was budget constrained and under political pressure to perform. The operation of the system degraded into a pork-barrel jobs program when it really needed to stay in permanent test-pilot mode.
100% of shuttle fatalities were under circumstances where management was told there was a problem, knew exactly what the problem was, and pressed on with operations anyway.
With a vaccine, the development phase is NOT budget constrained, and once the test-pilot phase is over, it's pretty easy to do sustained, indefinite routine operations (ex flu vaccine).