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// KEEP THE SPACE SHUTTLE FLYING. I understand the intent, but it is a bit funny that the comment references a system that is no longer operational due to its

• whalesalad 2y ago
  Well over 100 successful missions carrying a bunch of people and gear up into outer space and then bringing them back home. I hold it in a good light now, and will likely continue to feel that way. As far as human progress and net good, it was a success.
  • joebob42 2y ago
    100 is frankly not that impressive for software. A 2-9 system will sometimes work 100x in a row, and a 3-9 system usually will.
    • rco8786 2y ago
      100 missions. Not 100 code executions.
      • joebob42 2y ago
        Sure, but I imagine at least some components only really execute a small number of times per flight, or possibly never in the case of certain error handling code. Stretching the metaphor more than is probably appropriate, I'd treat launching the shuttle and having it come back as a big integration test. A system that passes it's integration test 100 times isn't necessarily particularly impressive in terms of reliability. We run our integration test tens of times a day, and it fails once or twice a month. Our system is kinda flaky :(
        • rco8786 2y ago
          > A system that passes it's integration test 100 times isn't necessarily particularly impressive in terms of reliability. So extending your own metaphor and using 100 as the number of missions, the integration test failed 2% of the time.
          • joebob42 2y ago
            A 2% failure rate isn't impressive, but I'm fine not crediting any of the shuttle issues to software. My only point is that 100 instance of use for purpose isn't enough, to my mind, to argue that a piece of software is exceptionally reliable.
    • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      Right, but the shuttle failures were not software failures.
    • ahartmetz 2y ago
      As far as we know, software never caused any dangerous incidents for the shuttle. You can't say that about Arianespace (Ariane 4 #1) or SpaceX (a couple of crashes while trying to land - low stakes though) or Airbus ("just" some bad UX in critical situations) or Boeing (software basically killed a few hundred people).
  • chgs 2y ago
    100 success and 2 failures. About a 1.6% failure rate from memory. That’s not a great record. Sure it’s a complex field, and it’s not as dangerous as say being US President, but a failure rate of >1% is not something to write home about.
    • nicce 2y ago
      So what was the failure rate of the previous shuttle?
    • mumblemumble 2y ago
      Its predecessor launch system had 10 successes and 2 failures for the crewed flights. One, they got the crew home safely, but it was close. So that's a 17% failure rate and a 8% rate of failures killing the crew. Not saying the Shuttle's success rate was awesome; I'm glad we demand more nowadays. But it still represented a pretty decent crew safety improvement for the USA's human spaceflight program.
    • atmavatar 2y ago
      Notably, both were hardware failures. Challenger blew up on launch because of a booster failure due to a faulty O-ring seal. Columbia burned up on re-entry because a piece of insulating foam broke off from the external tank during launch, damaging the heat tiles on its left wing. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
    • redwall_hp 2y ago
      One accident per 271,199,439 miles traveled seems pretty damn safe, applying the same standard used for other methods of travel. https://www3.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/pdf/566250main_SHUTTLE%20ERA%20FACTS_040412.pdf https://www3.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/pdf/566250main_SHUTTLE...
    • sqeaky 2y ago
      I encourage you to build a more reliable space plane. Please link me to your blog and I will read your updates daily.
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• ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Wasn't a poor safety record whut killed the shuttle. It was the cost, and anticipation of degraded safety, in the future. Even though more astronauts died, because of the two shuttle accidents, than any other NASA disaster, the safety record was absolutely amazing, when we consider everything that was going on. The code seems damn good code.
  • bpodgursky 2y ago
    2/100 catastrophic failures (deaths of entire crew) is not a good record even by the standards of spaceflight.
    • Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      For what it's worth, were any of those catastrophic failures caused by bad code?
      • bpodgursky 2y ago
        Did the amount of time spent on code formatting incur an opportunity cost for more impactful engineering safety investments?
        • yreg 2y ago
          Probably not.
        • whalesalad 2y ago
          the issues are pretty well documented and are all human failures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas... the challenger disaster is noteworthy as a tragic incident because many individuals tried to stop the launch knowing this (ahem, hardware) issue was present. to many people, it was not a surprise when it happened.
        • ajford 2y ago
          Given that the engineering safety folks are more than likely not the ones writing the code, I doubt it.
• andix 2y ago
  This code is keeping the space shuttle flying in our memories. Kubernetes never kept the space shuttles flying in a literal way.
• peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  The shuttle program was killed by costs. Keeping it flying safely was really expensive. Despite the safety record you mention, it was the best approximation of a spaceship that we, as a human species, ever created. A spaceship program is something you either fully commit to by spending billions on it, or you abandon it. Nevertheless, there has been nothing that has come close to it since.
• evil-olive 2y ago
  > a system that is no longer operational due to its poor safety record the safety problems with the shuttle were, broadly speaking, hardware problems and not software problems. from "Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle" [0], which was Richard Feynman's appendix to the report on the 1986 Challenger disaster: > To summarize then, the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality. There appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards so characteristic of the Solid Rocket Booster or Space Shuttle Main Engine safety systems. he specifically highlighted the quality of the avionics software as an example of how engineering on a project like the Shuttle could be done well, and wasn't doomed to be low-quality and unsafe simply by virtue of being a large complicated government project. 0: https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
• trte9343r4 2y ago
  Space Shuttle was part of "Star Wars" project to bring down the Soviet Union. It met its goals by being super expensive. Space flights were just side project...
• tomcam 2y ago
  Is its poor safety record due to software failures?
• seabass-labrax 2y ago
  The situation with the Space Shuttle is more complex than simply poor safety. In terms of missions, it has a better record than many other launch vehicles - 2 fatal missions out of 135 for the shuttle, 2 out of 66 for the Soviet-era Soyuz, and a frighteningly poor 1 fatal mission out of only 12 spaceflights for SpaceShipTwo. However, the Space Shuttle had a much larger crew capacity than most missions probably needed (up to eight astronauts compared to Apollo or Soyuz's three), especially considering that the majority of Soviet/Roscosmos, ESA and CNSA missions were autonomous and completely unmanned - no crew to endanger! Perhaps that makes the metaphor even better for Kubernetes: an highly engineered, capable and multi-purpose system requiring considerable attention, and probably used a little more than it should be.
  • akira2501 2y ago
    > had a much larger crew capacity than most missions probably needed We rarely flew the maximum number of passengers. On non-EVA missions we typically only sent up 5 astronauts. For EVA missions we usually sent up 7 with the two extra crew typically being dedicated to the EVA. EVAs are a real chore. The shuttle is at 14.7 psi with regular atmosphere, but the EVA suits are 4 psi with pure oxygen atmosphere, so you have to spend a lot of time pre-breathing just to put on the suit. It also drains the hell out of you because it's microgravity, not zero gravity, and moving around and positioning in the suit using just your hands all day wears you out fast. The extra capacity was also useful for bringing other nations personnel onto a mission with us. They didn't strictly have a large mission role, but it is good diplomacy, and helps other nations build up their own space program. Plus.. a few times.. we sent up 6 but brought back 7, which is a nice feature. Anyways, when not sending up extra crew, we used the additional space for equipment and large experiment packages, some of them as large as a single person. > and probably used a little more than it should be. NASA did a great job of making space flight look normal and routine. Which is a bummer, because if you dig into any of their voluminous documentation on the shuttle program as a whole, or into individual missions, they are all anything but. Space is just an absolutely insane environment to work in, let alone to discover and study from, and the shuttle was an excellent platform for that work. Somewhere along the way space commercialization became about building stations and just trucking people back and forth to them. And for that inglorious mission the shuttle is definitely not appropriate. Anyways.. one of my favorite things about the orbiter.. the front thermal windows need to be tinted; obviously, but what I found out recently is they used the same green dye they use in US banknotes to do that.
• mihaaly 2y ago
  Since they used aluminium in the Space Shuttle would that also reflect poor safety record on using aluminium in mission critical situations?
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• akira2501 2y ago
  > due to its poor safety record. Per passenger mile traveled, the most common measure, it's one of the safest vehicles ever created and flown. > will people even remember the Space Shuttle in a good light? This is an honest question, since my childhood was squarely in the 1980s, but how can you possibly not? Are you so young that your only perspective of this program and all it's missions and accomplishments are purely in retrospect and colored by the zeitgeist of our current civilian space contractors?
  • ianburrell 2y ago
    Not even close to safest vehicle unless mean space vehicle. Space Shuttle was in orbit for 21k orbits and traveled 542 million miles. Which gives 28 deaths per billion miles. Airliners are running 0.01 deaths per billion miles. Driving is 15 per billion miles. So it was worse than driving. Airliners beat it by 3 orders of magnitude. Which isn't surprising when US airliners travel distance of Space Shuttle in less than month.
    • akira2501 2y ago
      You are off by a factor of at least 5, because it's _passenger_ miles, not _vehicle_ miles. This is also why airlines are "so safe," because we put 300 people on them at a whack, if you were wondering where the "three orders of magnitude" actually comes from. It's still a man made machine being operated by humans. So it's 5.1. Three times safer than driving. You might apocryphally conclude they were at greater risk taking the astro van to the pad.
      • Vecr 2y ago
        Nah, the van goes slow and they have medical people right there, you could die there but it's essentially not going to happen.