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Boeing's Starliner set to fly astronauts for the first time on May 6
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Sure, I’m okay with flying on an orbiter with a 67% survival rate. But a Boeing spacecraft? Fuck outta here.
(Just to be clear I am in no way disagreeing with you)
Which is unforgivably low. Check the dates and see if you notice a modern-day program that’s overrepresented.
Space travel is dangerous and anyone who flies in space understands that and signed up for it. But the shuttle program had deliberately and pointlessly unsafe decisions that were taken for reasons of cost-cutting or simple management incompetence, and all the dead astronauts on those two shuttles are a direct result.
If you know you’re going to fly 135 missions, and you accept a 1.5% catastrophic failure rate, then you’re accepting blowing up two shuttles with everyone on board. Which is exactly what 1980s-era NASA did, not because it was an inevitable reality they couldn’t avoid, but because management had their heads up their asses and wasn’t invested in the idea of sacrificing their own convenience in order to keep the program safer than 1.5%.
Fair enough. My point was that 33% of the shuttles that were in service are not around anymore, because they've blown up killing all astronauts on board. 67% is the percent of the in service shuttles that have survived to the present day. But the words I was using were arguably just an incorrect way of phrasing that, so yeah you kind of have a point.
I can revise my statement to, for any given flight there seems to have been a 1.5% chance that the shuttle would malfunction and kill all the astronauts on board even if they did their jobs perfectly (and specifically for reasons of gross mismanagement of the program as opposed to the already-significant risks inherent to space travel), and that's too high for a vehicle which was explicitly being pushed hard as a "we can make these flights routine and do tons of them" solution. Sounds better?
Also, from the link I sent:
Don't just say "power was restored." TELL THE STORY YOU PUSSY
Also Boeing Space is an entirely different company, it may has well have a different name. Same with Boeing Defense.
I think a large part of that was that the majority of the shuttles service was spent in a pre-internet world. We literally didn't know the shuttles weaknesses until there were big incidents like Challenger and Columbia.
I was a kid in 86'. And (like a lot of others I'll bet) I was absolutely in awe of the shuttle. I was enamoured thanks to movies like SpaceCamp, etc...
Nowadays, with starliner, every failure in testing, every flaw, every glitch, is presented on a thousand tech blogs.