Photo courtesy of NASA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster
On February 1, 2013, millions of Americans commemorated the 10-year anniversary of the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia and its 7-member crew. Much less visible, however, was the 10-year anniversary of the 122 automobile crash deaths that also occurred in the United States on February 1, 2003.1 Space travel and road travel do not pose competing risks and are rarely considered together in any context. However, the 2 anniversaries offered a time to reflect on the deaths associated with these 2 disparate modes of travel and an opportunity to consider why these events produce such discordant public responses.
The United States has more automobiles than any other country on Earth, and about 87% of adult Americans are licensed to drive.2 In 2009, Americans collectively accumulated about 4.8 trillion kilometers of automobile travel (a distance equal to 16,000 round trips between the Earth and the Sun).3, 4 Most trips did not result in a crash, creating the impression that automobile travel is uneventful, innocuous, and far safer than spaceflight. To examine the validity of this perception, we compared the fatality risk associated with American automobile travel to the fatality risk associated with American spaceflight.
We determined the American spaceflight fatality risk by analyzing all crewed missions launched by the United States with a planned maximum altitude exceeding 100 kilometers (in accordance with the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale definition of spaceflight). Deaths during training were excluded (eg, fatal crashes during flights planned for lower altitudes, the fatalities resulting from the Apollo 1 training launch pad fire), as was distance accumulated by crew residing on a space station between spaceflight missions. The fatality risk associated with modern automobile travel in the United States was determined using the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database (drawing on data from 2010, the safest year on record at the time of the final Space Shuttle mission) and the most recent US Department of Transportation National Household Travel Survey.3, 4
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–John A. Staples, MD, MPH, Donald A. Redelmeier, MD, MSHSR
This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
