re: Liftoff-Landing
All deaths occured either on the ground, on the way up or on the way down. That's only a small fraction of the entire flight.
Surely, something can be done about this.
The Shuttle is very fragile during both those phases, while the Soyuz has improved from early flaws.
I'm not even convinced the Soyuz 1 tragedy should be included in the statistics.
It was a hurried (for political reasons) first test flight, with a number of flaws: like not being able to deploy one of the solar panels, making it unstable and consuming too little energy and the parachute was too big for its casing.
Raoul