The recent skydiving death of Sean Carey may have some interesting parallels for spaceflight and space exploration. As Abby Sewell said in the Los Angeles Times:

The deaths reflect a divergent nationwide trend: equipment upgrades and safety rules have reduced overall skydiving fatalities among novices — but the smaller, more aerodynamically designed parachutes have allowed more experienced divers to take more risks. Increasingly, industry veterans said, fatal accidents involve experts attempting advanced maneuvers with high-performance equipment.

We are likely to see a similar trend in human spaceflight over the next few decades. As suborbital and orbital spaceflight become more routine, safety will improve as operators benefit from experience (the learning-curve effect). At the same time, however, low-cost access to space and in-space infrastructure such as propellant depots will enable explorers to undertake riskier missions into deep space with increasing frequency. The result will be an increasing number of fatalities among NASA and commercial explorers on advanced missions to the Moon, the asteroids, Mars, and beyond, while near-space missions become safer and more routine. That should not be a cause for alarm, however. It is part of the normal process of opening a new frontier.