Explore "Subspace Survivors" by E.E. Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
At the time of this chronicle the status of interstellar flight was very / similar to that of intercontinental jet-plane flight in the / nineteen-sixties. Starships were designed by humanity's best brains; / carried every safety device those brains could devise. They were / maintained and serviced by ultra-skilled, ultra-trained, ultra-able / crews; they were operated by the _creme-de-la-creme_ of manhood. Only a / man with an extremely capable mind in an extremely capable body could / become an officer of a subspacer.
Statistically, starships were the safest means of transportation ever / used by man; so safe that Very Important Persons used them regularly, / unthinkingly, and as a matter of course. Statistically, the starships' / fatality rate per million passenger-light-years was a small fraction of / that of the automobiles' per million passenger-miles. Insurance / companies offered odds of tens of thousands to one that any given / star-traveler would return unharmed from any given star-trip he cared to / make.