There's no such thing as 100% safe. Remember Murphy's law. And when you're dealing with thousands of tons of highly explosive rocket fuel, you don't want to take unnecessary chances. Nobody in their right mind would get within a mile of a rocket launch, no matter how safe it was deemed to be.

The idea was not to make it perfectly safe, since that's impossible, but to reduce the chances of a catastrophic failure to an acceptable level. The risks were well understood and accepted.


And S-V, would you please stop changing up your initial posts like that? The edit button is there for the purpose of making minor corrections, not wholesale revisions. People need to see your original statements in order to understand the context of the replies. If you have something to add, post it in a reply at the bottom of the thread, where all the conversation is taking place anyway. It's just common courtesy.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere