SpaceX launch failure...

Quote from Aslan

Is it me or are we hearing more and more about spaceships blowing up?

Imho not really, considering that a few companies have emerged into the market in the past years and therefore way more rockets are being tested. If you recall history, the space programs went through pretty rough times before they finally stabilized things, so these companies are more or less going through the same initial issues. Also one should consider that rockets are always some kind of boolean, it is either a success or they're instantly gone due to a small error causing the gigantic amount of fuel to turn your shiny rocket into dust.

Quote from Aslan

So it seems odd to me that we're going backward and away from that time period.

I guess the NASA and other folks simply don't share how they accomplish it and these companies have to figure it out themselves. Again since rockets contain this large amounts of fuels, mistakes tend to be always catastrophic because there is no "little explosion". Think of electricity, if you don't know how much power needs to run through the wire to light a bulb and you put in to much, your bulb is gone.

Besides that, I can't remember an increase of rocket failures in the established rocket programs including those used to send supply and equipment to the ISS or deploy new satellites. Well, at least Roskosmos seems to misplace their rockets mid-air recently, but that's none of my business. By the way, I'm not that big into all this rocket stuff, chances are my memories are incomplete and/or completely messed up, in that case disregard my rant.