What would you consider to be the most reliable stock rocket?

[ThePyrateCaptain]

Apollo

Mercury

Gemini

Other

[Alavarien-46]

Soyouz, because of 50 years of service.

[mk78123]

Definately soyuz

[Johnno]

I wouldn't consider any of those as rockets. And I don't know what 'stock' has to do with it? Do you mean historical?

Edit: And as others have already pointed out, speaking of spacecrafts Soyuz is the most reliable because of its long service. There's not much to discuss.

Edited June 20, 2013 by Johnno

[Flixxbeatz]

Soyuz, then Proton.

[AHO]

defiantly soyuz

[DerekL1963]

The Soyuz booster is actually a family of related birds... the one used currently looks to the naked eye to be identical to the one used for the first Soyuz launch, but it actually isn't. (I'm still on my first cup of coffee, but IIRC there have been three different manned variants and several unmanned variants and some were used for both.) But even lumping all the [manned] Soyuz boosters together (in the same way you've lumped Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas together, and ditto for Saturn's I and V), you don't have enough flights to make a valid judgement of it's reliability. The error bars are simply too large. (When a single failure can shift your reliability numbers by more than 1%, as is the case for manned Soyuz, your numbers aren't reliable.)

It's also worth pointing out the other bias in your poll - when you compare the launch failures for Soyuz (manned variants lumped) at 1/87 (.011) with the Shuttle (counting both Challenger and Columbia as launch accidents) at 2/130 (.015)... they really aren't all that different.

But, what's considered reliable in space is considered horribly unreliable in pretty much any other field of engineering. Just to put this in context - if the aircraft taking off from Sea-Tac collectively had a reliability of 99% (roughly the collective reliability of all space boosters to date)... there would be on average nearly fifty crashes on takeoff every day.

[Dexee]

Hands down, the Soyuz capsules. Everyone that has posted has already covered the pros of it. Simple enough, right?

[ThePyrateCaptain]

The Soyuz booster is actually a family of related birds... the one used currently looks to the naked eye to be identical to the one used for the first Soyuz launch, but it actually isn't. (I'm still on my first cup of coffee, but IIRC there have been three different manned variants and several unmanned variants and some were used for both.) But even lumping all the [manned] Soyuz boosters together (in the same way you've lumped Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas together, and ditto for Saturn's I and V), you don't have enough flights to make a valid judgement of it's reliability. The error bars are simply too large. (When a single failure can shift your reliability numbers by more than 1%, as is the case for manned Soyuz, your numbers aren't reliable.)

It's also worth pointing out the other bias in your poll - when you compare the launch failures for Soyuz (manned variants lumped) at 1/87 (.011) with the Shuttle (counting both Challenger and Columbia as launch accidents) at 2/130 (.015)... they really aren't all that different.

But, what's considered reliable in space is considered horribly unreliable in pretty much any other field of engineering. Just to put this in context - if the aircraft taking off from Sea-Tac collectively had a reliability of 99% (roughly the collective reliability of all space boosters to date)... there would be on average nearly fifty crashes on takeoff every day.

Your an engineer arnt you? I was referring to in game usage. Perhaps I shou.d have included that statement in the poll title. I was taking this survey cause due to the limitations of my own personal machine, I am deleting "useless" vehicles.

[Psycho0124]

Other: Orion. Nothing else could have been relied on to bring thousand-ton payloads to orbit. Need a skyscraper on the moon? No problem. Naval destroyer around Mars? Sure thing.

Shame it was never built..

The book written about the project by Dysons son is pretty hilarious though. Lots of great rocket scientist humor.

[DerekL1963]

Your an engineer arnt you? I was referring to in game usage.

In that case, are so many [stock/game] versions of those boosters that your poll is pretty much meaningless without knowing which particular variants we're voting on. And no, I'm not an engineer, just someone who has actually studied space history and engineering as opposed to just repeating the cargo cult versions so prevalent here and elsewhere.

It's also worth pointing out the other bias in your poll - when you compare the launch failures for Soyuz (manned variants lumped) at 1/87 (.011) with the Shuttle (counting both Challenger and Columbia as launch accidents) at 2/130 (.015)... they really aren't all that different.

Nit to myself (I said I was posting on one cup of coffee) - there have been two Soyuz booster failures... one fire on the launch pad which caused the crew to activate the escape system, and one in-flight failure of the second and third stages to separate.

[UmbralRaptor]

This poll seems b0rked. None of the prebuilt stock rockets quite correspond with any of those. Worse still, some of those missions used multiple rockets. For Mercury, do you mean Atlas or Redstone? For Apollo, do you mean Saturn Ib or Saturn V?

[Spaceisbeautifulul]

Soyuz, no question.

[The mun]

Other: Orion. Nothing else could have been relied on to bring thousand-ton payloads to orbit. Need a skyscraper on the moon? No problem. Naval destroyer around Mars? Sure thing.

Shame it was never built..

The book written about the project by Dysons son is pretty hilarious though. Lots of great rocket scientist humor.

nasas new spacecraft is called orion

[Pugspaceprogram]

I don't disagree with Soyuz, but i specifically think that the Progress was good as, if it were to crash, nobody would die (It was probe powered).

[Brotoro]

The Saturn Launch vehicles, once man rated, had a 100% launch success rate.