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

Many people here are talking about the difficulty of rocketry, which is huge, but I think many people are forgetting a big piece: sample size.

There are very very few things in this world that happen as infrequently as a space launch. There have only been ~200 crewed flights by NASA and ~5,000 orbital launches by the world.

Cars produced: over 1 billion

TVs produced each YEAR: ~200 million

Aircraft flights per year: ~10,000

No matter what you are doing, if you don’t do it enough, you’ll never become an expert at it, and until you become an expert at it, you can be rest-assured you will have issues.