[_zamorano_]

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.

[alexpotato]

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

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]

  > 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.

[hinkley]

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)

[rachofsunshine]

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_ac...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifica...

[3] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/

[Gazoche]

> 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.

But 14 of those were caused by the shuttle alone. All the others were over 50 years ago. So far, all the spacecrafts still in use today have had a pretty good track record.

[bell-cot]

> ... of whom 19 have died in accidents ...

Skimming your reference [1], I see 11 more who died in accidents during testing & training. Including the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 fire on the launch pad (during a launch rehearsal test).

Until spaceflight is "buy your ticket, show up, get in your seat, wait, exit at your destination", I'd argue that we should include the testing & training risks in the risk of human spaceflight.

[lobochrome]

Small populations make for terrible statistics.

[jajko]

Or taking a guided climb of Mt Everest, roughly same numbers (compared to Aconcagua which sits around 30%)

[krisoft]

> 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%)

[goodcanadian]

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.

[bsder]

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.

[lupusreal]

Turns out, making something look like an airplane doesn't mean you can treat it like an airplane.

[pfdietz]

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.

[jccooper]

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]

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]

> In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often.

I think two catastrophic space shuttle failures is more than enough :-/