Quoting from this site:
The explosion of the Challenger in 1986, after 24 consecutive shuttle flights, grounded all U.S. manned space missions for more than two years. (Compare that with the early history of aviation, when 20 of the first 40 pilots hired by the Post Office died in crashes within three years, with no suspension of service.) Since the Columbia tragedy in 2003, spaceflights have seemed more hazardous than the pioneering ones of the 1960s. Now, 45 years after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, spaceflight remains horribly risky: one fatal crash in every 66 flights.
It’s time for private enterprise to step in and bring the risk down. Until SpaceShipOne’s three flights in 2004, there were no entrepreneurs actively testing spaceflight hardware in order to solve cost and safety issues. No one was addressing the desires of the public to explore, to float weightless, and to see the black sky.
Makes sense to me. I wanna go!!
The author of the article, if you’re wondering, is Burt Rutan. Yes, that one.