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

In a rocket you will have a couple of thousand parts that each have to work in order for the whole thing to function.

Now imagine you can achieve a failure rate of only 0.1% through good engineering.

That still means a couple of parts on average will fail per launch.

Of course you can spend a lot of time and money to make everything more reliable on its own, but thats greatly diminished returns at some point.

The better way to solve that is redundant systems, so a single failure will have none/only minor consequences