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So I suposse building an aircraft involves standard bolts, procedures, testing and much more standarized ways. In contrast a spacecraft like the shuttle, faces

So I suposse building an aircraft involves standard bolts, procedures, testing and much more standarized ways. In contrast a spacecraft like the shuttle, faces much harsher conditions and, as not many of these were built, I expect more manual procedures and tinkering while building the thing. In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often.

kelnos 2y ago
> In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often. I think two catastrophic space shuttle failures is more than enough :-/
pfdietz 2y ago
Also, the smaller number, and the smaller number of flights, means much less experience to wring out the low probability gotchas. Today's extremely reliable airliners got that way on a long, long string of accidents and near accidents.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
The risk of spaceflight is still very high. Wiki [1] lists 676 people as having traveled to space, of whom 19 have died in accidents as a result of that travel, meaning that going to space has about a 3% chance of killing you. The average age of an astronaut is 34 [2], and most are male, so a look at an actuarial table [3] tells us that going to space is approximately as likely to kill you as literally every risk an ordinary person would take in their life up to that point (at 34 years of age, about 4.3% of men have died, and a large proportion of those deaths are due [4] to accidental injury). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifica... [3] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/
- krisoft 2y ago
  > at 34 years of age, about 4.3% of men have died I think what you are saying is that 34 years after being born 4.3% of male individuals are dead. In my understanding if someone dies when they are 10 years old they will never be "34 years of age". This probably feels nitpicky but it has thrown me into a loop of trying to understand what you are saying. (Not even mentioning that I read the table you linked as 4.2% not 4.3%)
  - pc86 2y ago
    This seems needlessly pedantic as the meaning is still very clear. And you did mention it, by saying you weren't mentioning it.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > This seems needlessly pedantic as the meaning is still very clear. As I said it wasn’t clear to me. The two meaning which was fighting in my mind were the one i wrote and that the percentage is the probability of a male dying in their 34th year of life. Had to consult with the table to figure out which one they mean. > And you did mention it, by saying you weren't mentioning it. Well spotted. Exactly because the discrepancy troubles me. It either means that I don’t understand how to read or what to read in the table (in which case I would love to be corrected) or that the commenter made a typo (which doesn’t matter at all). If i were certain it is a typo I wouldn’t mention it. But since I can’t be certain that the error is not “in my equipment” i shared the observation hoping to get clarification.
  - chasd00 2y ago
    Saying 95.7% of men live to at least 34 would be more clear. (i have no idea if that stat is legit or not, i'm just writing it differently)
    - krisoft 2y ago
      That sounds even better! Thank you for that rephrasing.
goodcanadian 2y ago
That was part of the rationale behind the space shuttle in the first place. It was to create a space plane with aircraft-like operations in order to fine tune processes and technology to bring down the cost of space flight. Unfortunately, NASA never managed the operational cadence required, in part, because of the per-flight cost (which was, in turn, high, in part, because of the low flight cadence). It was a fine idea, but it didn't work out so well in practice.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Turns out, making something look like an airplane doesn't mean you can treat it like an airplane.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    The space shuttle's appearance has little to do with its flight cadence - the airplane-like flight cadence (and thus, airplane-like reliability and cost) just never manifested. Especially after January 1986.
- bsder 2y ago
  It also didn't help that the design was compromised. In order to get funding from the miltary, the shuttle had to be able to switch to a polar orbit which is why it had those stupidly large engines that serve no purpose otherwise. If you get rid of that, you actually can design a reusable space plane.
alexpotato 2y ago
NASA has incredibly detailed records about every piece of their spacecraft down to things like: - material used to make a bolt - what the torque used to tighten the bolt was - who tightened the blot - when it was tightened - etc This allows them trace back through the history of each vehicle for debugging purposes. They also applied this to the Space Shuttle software. This article from 1996 does an amazing job of describing the process: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff It's interesting how modern some of the practices described are. Plus, some of the practices (E.g. the bug rate model), from my experience, only existed there.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  > It's interesting how modern some of the practices described are. It should be noted that among famous NASA inventions, modern Project Management is listed among them.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- hinkley 2y ago
  A reusable aircraft that faces that sort of intense vibration, I'm not at all surprised that we need to track when the last time each bolt was checked and by whom. (One of the things you have to watch out for is that if the torque on a nut drops for no reason, it may be a hairline crack in the bolt it's attached to)
jccooper 2y ago
Though a large batch and large amount of flights by space standards, Shuttle was basically all prototypes by normal manufacturing standards. The 135 STS flights wouldn't even make a dent in an airliner certification and test campaign. It's not surprising they kept encountering problems.
hinkley 2y ago
Even in commercial aerospace, every part is tracked like a library book. There's rarely a question about whether a particular part is the right part or more importantly a used part. Because there's a chain of custody for each one. You also have some parts that are destined for QA purposes, and those have a tagging system that is meant to prevent them from being recycled onto a real aircraft once they've been used for stress testing.

kelnos 2y ago

> In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often. I think two catastrophic space shuttle failures is more than enough :-/

pfdietz 2y ago

Also, the smaller number, and the smaller number of flights, means much less experience to wring out the low probability gotchas. Today's extremely reliable airliners got that way on a long, long string of accidents and near accidents.

rachofsunshine 2y ago

The risk of spaceflight is still very high. Wiki [1] lists 676 people as having traveled to space, of whom 19 have died in accidents as a result of that travel, meaning that going to space has about a 3% chance of killing you. The average age of an astronaut is 34 [2], and most are male, so a look at an actuarial table [3] tells us that going to space is approximately as likely to kill you as literally every risk an ordinary person would take in their life up to that point (at 34 years of age, about 4.3% of men have died, and a large proportion of those deaths are due [4] to accidental injury). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifica... [3] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/

krisoft 2y ago
> at 34 years of age, about 4.3% of men have died I think what you are saying is that 34 years after being born 4.3% of male individuals are dead. In my understanding if someone dies when they are 10 years old they will never be "34 years of age". This probably feels nitpicky but it has thrown me into a loop of trying to understand what you are saying. (Not even mentioning that I read the table you linked as 4.2% not 4.3%)
- pc86 2y ago
  This seems needlessly pedantic as the meaning is still very clear. And you did mention it, by saying you weren't mentioning it.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > This seems needlessly pedantic as the meaning is still very clear. As I said it wasn’t clear to me. The two meaning which was fighting in my mind were the one i wrote and that the percentage is the probability of a male dying in their 34th year of life. Had to consult with the table to figure out which one they mean. > And you did mention it, by saying you weren't mentioning it. Well spotted. Exactly because the discrepancy troubles me. It either means that I don’t understand how to read or what to read in the table (in which case I would love to be corrected) or that the commenter made a typo (which doesn’t matter at all). If i were certain it is a typo I wouldn’t mention it. But since I can’t be certain that the error is not “in my equipment” i shared the observation hoping to get clarification.
- chasd00 2y ago
  Saying 95.7% of men live to at least 34 would be more clear. (i have no idea if that stat is legit or not, i'm just writing it differently)
  - krisoft 2y ago
    That sounds even better! Thank you for that rephrasing.

goodcanadian 2y ago

That was part of the rationale behind the space shuttle in the first place. It was to create a space plane with aircraft-like operations in order to fine tune processes and technology to bring down the cost of space flight. Unfortunately, NASA never managed the operational cadence required, in part, because of the per-flight cost (which was, in turn, high, in part, because of the low flight cadence). It was a fine idea, but it didn't work out so well in practice.

lupusreal 2y ago
Turns out, making something look like an airplane doesn't mean you can treat it like an airplane.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  The space shuttle's appearance has little to do with its flight cadence - the airplane-like flight cadence (and thus, airplane-like reliability and cost) just never manifested. Especially after January 1986.
bsder 2y ago
It also didn't help that the design was compromised. In order to get funding from the miltary, the shuttle had to be able to switch to a polar orbit which is why it had those stupidly large engines that serve no purpose otherwise. If you get rid of that, you actually can design a reusable space plane.

alexpotato 2y ago

NASA has incredibly detailed records about every piece of their spacecraft down to things like: - material used to make a bolt - what the torque used to tighten the bolt was - who tightened the blot - when it was tightened - etc This allows them trace back through the history of each vehicle for debugging purposes. They also applied this to the Space Shuttle software. This article from 1996 does an amazing job of describing the process: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff It's interesting how modern some of the practices described are. Plus, some of the practices (E.g. the bug rate model), from my experience, only existed there.

dotancohen 2y ago
> It's interesting how modern some of the practices described are. It should be noted that among famous NASA inventions, modern Project Management is listed among them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hinkley 2y ago
A reusable aircraft that faces that sort of intense vibration, I'm not at all surprised that we need to track when the last time each bolt was checked and by whom. (One of the things you have to watch out for is that if the torque on a nut drops for no reason, it may be a hairline crack in the bolt it's attached to)

jccooper 2y ago

Though a large batch and large amount of flights by space standards, Shuttle was basically all prototypes by normal manufacturing standards. The 135 STS flights wouldn't even make a dent in an airliner certification and test campaign. It's not surprising they kept encountering problems.

hinkley 2y ago

Even in commercial aerospace, every part is tracked like a library book. There's rarely a question about whether a particular part is the right part or more importantly a used part. Because there's a chain of custody for each one. You also have some parts that are destined for QA purposes, and those have a tagging system that is meant to prevent them from being recycled onto a real aircraft once they've been used for stress testing.