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Why was Space Shuttle code so good and the engineering so bad? The thing was expensive and shit and had a 1.5% catastrophic failure rate for passenger transport

Why was Space Shuttle code so good and the engineering so bad? The thing was expensive and shit and had a 1.5% catastrophic failure rate for passenger transport. Soyuz was two orders of magnitude better. Russia/USSR have reputation for McGyvering things and US has reputation for gold-plating but US ship is killing people every 65 flights and Russian ship has over 1500 launches without death. Maybe engineers should learn from either Soviet/Russian engineers or from NASA software engineers. Both are making more reliable things.

teractiveodular 2y ago
Multiple books have been written on this very topic, but the TL;DR is that the problem was not the engineering, but the absurd, often mutually contradictory design decisions forced on it for political reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process
- nvarsj 2y ago
  The irony is this kind of describes k8s as well.
  - Yasuraka 2y ago
    How so?
    - nvarsj 2y ago
      Hmm I guess my comment was kind of tongue in cheek. I think a lot of k8s was driven by political or pet-project reasons. E.g. using etcd.
ranger207 2y ago
https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/after-ten-years-a-few-words-from-admiral-gehman/ https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/after-ten-years-a... > I need to give you the issue from the NASA point of view so you can understand the pressures that they were under. In a developmental program, any developmental program, the program manager essentially has four areas to trade. The first one is money. Obviously, he can go get more money if he falls behind schedule. If he runs into technical difficulties or something goes wrong, he can go ask for more money. The second one is quantity. The third one is performance margin. If you are in trouble with your program, and it isn’t working, you shave the performance. You shave the safety margin. You shave the margins. The fourth one is time. If you are out of money, and you’re running into technical problems, or you need more time to solve a margin problem, you spread the program out, take more time. These are the four things that a program manager has. If you are a program manager for the shuttle, the option of quantity is eliminated. There are only four shuttles. You’re not going to buy any more. What you got is what you got. If money is being held constant, which it is—they’re on a fixed budget, and I’ll get into that later—then if you run into some kind of problem with your program, you can only trade time and margin. If somebody is making you stick to a rigid time schedule, then you’ve only got one thing left, and that’s margin. By margin, I mean either redundancy—making something 1.5 times stronger than it needs to be instead of 1.7 times stronger than it needs to be—or testing it twice instead of five times. That’s what I mean by margin. > It has always been amazing to me how many members of Congress, officials in the Department of Defense, and program managers in our services forget this little rubric. Any one of them will enforce for one reason or another rigid standard against one or two of those parameters. They’ll either give somebody a fixed budget, or they’ll give somebody a fixed time, and they forget that when they do that, it’s like pushing on a balloon. You push in one place, and it pushes out the other place, and it’s amazing how many smart people forget that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
twobitshifter 2y ago
Soyuz doesn’t look like it came from a movie and can’t fly like a plane to touch down on a runway.
Merad 2y ago
Where are you getting 1500 Soyuz flights? As far as I can find the number is more like 150. It also experienced failure and loss of crew on two missions (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11).
- renewiltord 2y ago
  It's correct. I have confused Soyuz launcher with Soyuz spacecraft like newbie. It's true. Soyuz spacecraft has early failures (till 1971, none after). Shuttle has late failures (2003, then project decommission). I suppose design improvement in Soyuz, engineering quality decrease in Shuttle. Incompetent early Soyuz design team. Incompetent late Shuttle engineering team. Lack of ethics to make such broken devices.

teractiveodular 2y ago

Multiple books have been written on this very topic, but the TL;DR is that the problem was not the engineering, but the absurd, often mutually contradictory design decisions forced on it for political reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process

nvarsj 2y ago
The irony is this kind of describes k8s as well.
- Yasuraka 2y ago
  How so?
  - nvarsj 2y ago
    Hmm I guess my comment was kind of tongue in cheek. I think a lot of k8s was driven by political or pet-project reasons. E.g. using etcd.

ranger207 2y ago

https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/after-ten-years-a-few-words-from-admiral-gehman/ https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/after-ten-years-a... > I need to give you the issue from the NASA point of view so you can understand the pressures that they were under. In a developmental program, any developmental program, the program manager essentially has four areas to trade. The first one is money. Obviously, he can go get more money if he falls behind schedule. If he runs into technical difficulties or something goes wrong, he can go ask for more money. The second one is quantity. The third one is performance margin. If you are in trouble with your program, and it isn’t working, you shave the performance. You shave the safety margin. You shave the margins. The fourth one is time. If you are out of money, and you’re running into technical problems, or you need more time to solve a margin problem, you spread the program out, take more time. These are the four things that a program manager has. If you are a program manager for the shuttle, the option of quantity is eliminated. There are only four shuttles. You’re not going to buy any more. What you got is what you got. If money is being held constant, which it is—they’re on a fixed budget, and I’ll get into that later—then if you run into some kind of problem with your program, you can only trade time and margin. If somebody is making you stick to a rigid time schedule, then you’ve only got one thing left, and that’s margin. By margin, I mean either redundancy—making something 1.5 times stronger than it needs to be instead of 1.7 times stronger than it needs to be—or testing it twice instead of five times. That’s what I mean by margin. > It has always been amazing to me how many members of Congress, officials in the Department of Defense, and program managers in our services forget this little rubric. Any one of them will enforce for one reason or another rigid standard against one or two of those parameters. They’ll either give somebody a fixed budget, or they’ll give somebody a fixed time, and they forget that when they do that, it’s like pushing on a balloon. You push in one place, and it pushes out the other place, and it’s amazing how many smart people forget that.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

twobitshifter 2y ago

Soyuz doesn’t look like it came from a movie and can’t fly like a plane to touch down on a runway.

Merad 2y ago

Where are you getting 1500 Soyuz flights? As far as I can find the number is more like 150. It also experienced failure and loss of crew on two missions (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11).

renewiltord 2y ago
It's correct. I have confused Soyuz launcher with Soyuz spacecraft like newbie. It's true. Soyuz spacecraft has early failures (till 1971, none after). Shuttle has late failures (2003, then project decommission). I suppose design improvement in Soyuz, engineering quality decrease in Shuttle. Incompetent early Soyuz design team. Incompetent late Shuttle engineering team. Lack of ethics to make such broken devices.