It’s been more than 40 years since the first successful space shuttle launch. However, as we saw with the recent NASA launch, we still have launch failures. Why is it so tough to achieve reliability in space shuttle launches? Does this apply to all space technology?

Question

It’s been more than 40 years since the first successful space shuttle launch. However, as we saw with the recent NASA launch, we still have launch failures. Why is it so tough to achieve reliability in space shuttle launches? Does this apply to all space technology?

In:

Answer 1

Because we don’t have that many people invested in building rockets unlike cars and planes and even then, cars and planes fail constantly still.

Reliability is just tough in general if you don’t have many people working together on the project. And even then, like cars, things still always go wrong.

Achieving reliability for NASA is like asking Ferrari to make sure their f1 car won’t constantly break down.