How many human deaths have been associated with space travel? ?

Question

Thank you so much

Answer 1

If it's disasters in space flight, there have been 2 or 3 of those, and maybe 14-20 people died in these disasters.

Answer 2

Hard to say accurately, as the number of deaths in the space program is not always caused by space travel.

The Nedelin disaster in the USSR is for example not related to space travel (it was a R-16 ICBM test), but is considered a spaceflight death (as it has to do with rockets).

I would estimate around officially 500 world wide, including Nedelin (about 120 deaths), the Plesetsk explosion in 1980 (48 death), The Brazilian VLS explosion (21) and the Chinese CZ-3B rocket crash into a village (51 dead, inofficially 200).

Plus a high number of Russian or Kazakh junk thieves, who attempted to steal highly toxic rocket debris from the stage crash zones of the USSR.  

Answer 3

Difficult to say unless you define 'associated with' more precisely. However, assuming you mean deaths that involved a crew actually in a spacecraft at the time of death, then the total is 21.

Apollo 1: the three man crew died when a fire broke out in their spacecraft during a ground test prior to flight. Due to the hatch design (it opened inwards, being designed to work in a vacuum and hold the internal pressure)  the heat and pressure inside meant they could not escape, and the pure oxygen atmosphere made the fire burn rapidly out of control.

Soyuz 1: Vladimir Komarov made the first flight in the Soyuz spacecraft, despite many feeling it was not ready to fly. The flight was a disaster, and Komarov was killed when the parachutes fouled after re-entry, allowing his spacecraft to slam into the ground at several hundred miles per hour.

Soyuz 11: The three man crew died when a valve designed to equalise the internal pressure of the capsule after re-entry was jolted open too soon, allowing the atmosphere inside to leak into space. The capsule touched down safely on automatic systems, and rescue crews found the cosmonauts asphyxiated inside.

Challenger: The shuttle was destroyed 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all 7 aboard.

Columbia: The shuttle disintegrated on re-entry killing all seven aboard.