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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The space shuttle became obsolete technology after all those years. Would've needed a redesign.

> The space shuttle became obsolete technology after all those years. Would've needed a redesign.

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.

Dream Chaser wants to fill those shoes.

- https://www.sierraspace.com/dream-chaser-spaceplane/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Chaser

- https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/a-new-space-plane-gets-r...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVIXI09-AYw

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q8tGVUnoZg

Meanwhile the X37 is just silently doing everything the Air Force wanted the shuttle to do and probably way better since it doesn't need to meet anyone's long term goals of space exploration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

What so bad about old technology? Siemens is still selling point mechanisms based on designs that are almost as old as electric motors themselves. They work just fine.

2/100 catastrophic failures (deaths of entire crew) is not a good record even by the standards of spaceflight.

For what it's worth, were any of those catastrophic failures caused by bad code?

Did the amount of time spent on code formatting incur an opportunity cost for more impactful engineering safety investments?

Probably not.

the issues are pretty well documented and are all human failures.

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.

Given that the engineering safety folks are more than likely not the ones writing the code, I doubt it.

But in neither case was it due to a code failure that put the shuttle into an unrecoverable state, but rather one the falls into materials and/or mechanical engineering.

> 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.

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.

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