The discussions of the risks remind me of Buzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space. That’s a game that pretty much guarantees that your moon landing will end in death and disaster, because it models all sorts of critical failure points and assigns them high enough failure probabilities that overall failure is nearly certain.
The designer didn’t sufficiently grasp statistics, and assigned lots of failure chances based on what he felt the overall risk was supposed to be. The common mistake of not understanding how failure probabilities multiply. There’s a NASA PDF which goes into a retrospective analysis, and gives the individual risk factors for each step at between 0.1% to 1%, and the overall chance of mission failure for a single launch at about 5.5% and loss of crew at 1.7%.
As mission time goes up, the number of failure points go up, and they multiply. I didn’t find any serious analysis in a quick search, but going from a ~7 day mission time to ~400 days has some nasty implications. I wouldn’t be surprised if chance of mission failure was about 95% based on that alone.
The PC game Tharsis also comes to mind. It’s not at all a serious simulation, and it starts with the assumption that the crisis comes about due to an in-flight disaster damaging the ship rather than the trip being inherently risky, but it’s an interesting experience in risk management. It’s quite winnable, I’ve gotten all 4 crew members to Mars several times, but it demonstrates what failure cascades look like without being as frustrating as BARIS.
