I understand the intent, but it is a bit funny that the comment references a system that is no longer operational due to its poor safety record.
In ten years or so, will people even remember the Space Shuttle in a good light?
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.
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.
We run our integration test tens of times a day, and it fails once or twice a month. Our system is kinda flaky :(
So extending your own metaphor and using 100 as the number of missions, the integration test failed 2% of the time.
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.
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.
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_ac...
https://www3.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/pdf/566250main_SHUTTLE...
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.
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.
Are people aware of how old the technology is that's currently putting objects and people into space? No, the space shuttle was not obsolete. It was expensive... very expensive. To this day, we still don't have a replacement for it's capabilities though.
That's "the operation was successful but the patient died" logic. Killing over 1% of your riders is not a good safety record! No ifs, no buts.
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.
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.
Space is *insane*. I spent some time with satalite engineers. Space is far beyond hostile.
I loved 'For all mankind." Even with it's problems.
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?
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.
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.
Space flights were just side project...
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.