It's a fact of life. Rockets sometimes fail. The curse of the rocketeer strikes all, regardless of size, type, nationality or purpose. The history of rocket failures is older than spaceflight itself. It shows no signs of stopping in the future.

The spaceflight community has ways of dealing with this. Test and check. Stop if there's a serious problem before launch. Launch if you can. If it fails, pick up the pieces (sometimes literally) and try to work out what happened. Do your best to make sure it doesn't happen that way again. Then repeat the cycle.

Thus we lurch through the launches, mostly getting it right, but still with enough failures to worry us. It's only fair that we should be worried. Yet it seems that too many people are not worried enough.

We cannot expect spaceflight to be as reliable as ground transport or aviation, but it really should be a lot better. We have more than half a century of experience with rocketry. We could accept a high level of failure in the earliest decade of spaceflight, but those times have long passed. What seems to have changed is the attitude of too many engineers and managers. There is a grudging acknowledgement of failure, which is understandable. But there should not be so much acceptance of failure.

Spaceflight is hard. Rocketry is hard. Yes, we know. But hard challenges are routinely met with safety and reliability in so many other high-tech industries. Listen to the causes of so many recent rocket failures, and it is hard to accept what has happened. They are not caused by any mysterious physical phenomena. Often, there are very mundane and preventable causes. Once in a while, something like this is bound to happen. The problem is that it happens too much.

There really needs to be a stronger response from the spaceflight community. In fact, some sectors need to give out howls of rage. It's about time that rocketry became more reliable. It should become more difficult to accept the mediocre performance standards of the whole global space launch industry. The public knows that astronauts walked on the Moon before many of them were even born. Now they watch mundane orbital launches shower the ocean with debris.

Cry foul. There isn't enough money. There aren't enough people, or enough time, or enough resources. This still does not excuse the overall state of the industry. Spaceflight is standing on the shoulders of giants in so many fields.

It has the benefit of so many breakthroughs in related engineering such as electronics and materials science. It also has the support of governments, corporations, research institutions and benevolent investors. That's as much backing as almost any industry gets.

Fixing this problem will take a long time, and it will be an arduous process. But the first major step needs to be a change in attitudes and expectations. The spaceflight community seems to be settling into a comfort zone of mediocrity. This has to be acknowledged. It has to be challenged. It has to be rejected.

There will be a lot of resistance to the ideas in this article. Such resistance is symptomatic of the problems this article addresses. Reform must come, even though some people will find it painful. If the spaceflight community does not improve its performance in the next decade, it will probably enter a long period of decline that will see the human race remain Earthbound for its long-term future. It would be tragic to see that happen. It could even hasten the fall of our civilization.

The spaceflight community finds itself under attack from so many external factors in government and society. Ironically, the greatest threats to spaceflight probably come from within.

The industry cannot defend itself against critics when it cannot perform at the standards that the world expects of other modern enterprises. Much of the external criticisms against spaceflight are ill-informed and unjustified. But when the spaceflight community underperforms, it arms its critics with ammunition that's far stronger; facts and truth. The spaceflight community needs to improve for its own survival, and the survival of far more than just the space industry.

Dr Morris Jones is an Australian space analyst who has written for spacedaily.com since 1999. Email morrisjonesNOSPAMhotmail.com. Replace NOSPAM with @ to send email. Dr Jones will answer media inquiries.