After each fatal incident, the nation has responded with shock and grief. These explorers—our explorers, Earth’s explorers—paid for that exploration with their lives. Questions arose. Some—How did this happen?—are left to inspectors and investigators. But others—How big a cost are humans willing to bear to leave the planet?—lie in the public domain. The answers seem to have changed throughout the decades, as space travel seemed to evolve from something novel to something routine.

Today, industry and government are both upshifting gears, back into novelty, which means the public’s attitudes toward space travel and its inevitable accidents may return to what they were in NASA’s early, more adventurous days. After decades in a stable and predictable orbit, American spaceflight will return to new vehicles and, maybe, new destinations. The country is deciding which far-off world to point ships toward next, with the moon and Mars the most likely candidates. Private companies are doing the same, and preparing to take high rollers on suborbital romps. And with that leap into the unknown, Americans may become more tolerant of the loss of astronaut life. If they don’t, the government and private industry might not be able to make the leap at all.

We all know people probably will die on these new missions, especially if they become commonplace, as many hope. What no one knows is how we will all respond to those losses.

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When Grissom and his compatriots signed on to the astronaut corps, times were different. They were different: cowboy test pilots—military men, mostly, with that rightest of stuff. Space, and the flight paths to and through it, was basically uncharted. Rockets blew up—a lot—listing sideways, spinning tail over teakettle, exploding heads in the ground like ostriches.

And the astronauts themselves were, for the most part, inured to their mortality. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe repeatedly references the euphemism the early astronauts used to describe fatal crashes: The fliers had “screwed the pooch.” It’s gallows humor: The pilots and astronauts couldn’t completely control their survival—but they could at once face death, distance themselves from it, and use tone to strip it of power.

The public perceived these guys (and they were all guys) as all-American swaggerers, laying their lives on the line for the primacy of the country.

“It was a battle in the Cold War,” says Rand Simberg, author of Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming the Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space.

The nation, of course, mourned the Apollo 1 crew’s loss—especially given its gruesome nature. But the public and the government were perhaps not surprised, or philosophically disturbed, that people had to die if Americans were to get to the moon in a decade. In an article called “Space Travel: Risk, Ethics, and Governance in Commercial Human Spaceflight,” space strategist Sara Langston looks to other fields to understand attitudes and regulations about space exploration. “In the Encyclopedia of Public Health, [Daniel] Krewski defines acceptable risk as the likelihood of an event whose probability of occurrence is small, whose consequences are so slight, or whose benefits (perceived or real) are so great that individuals or groups in society are willing to take or be subjected to the risk that the event might occur,” she writes. The risk of space accidents, by inference, are subject to the same kind of cost-benefit analysis.