In many circumstances system designers or users often refer to a specific propellant as being "unsafe" or being the cause of accidents, mishaps or fatalities. This paper seeks to explore the historical data of propellant operations and offer some metrics and broad conclusions for specific propellants/combinations. Historical data will be limited to US launch vehicles from 1945 to 1999, Apollo from 1963 to 1971 and the Soviet Soyuz launch vehicle history up to 1999. It is shown that all rocket propellants/combinations having widespread adoption and use to be roughly comparable in terms of failures per mass of propellant consumed.
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