<story><title>STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)</title><url>https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-we-dont-need-any-more-of-those/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_zamorano_</author><text>So I suposse building an aircraft involves standard bolts, procedures, testing and much more standarized ways.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;In the end, it&amp;#x27;s incredible these things didn&amp;#x27;t crash more often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alexpotato</author><text>NASA has incredibly detailed records about every piece of their spacecraft down to things like:&lt;p&gt;- material used to make a bolt&lt;p&gt;- what the torque used to tighten the bolt was&lt;p&gt;- who tightened the blot&lt;p&gt;- when it was tightened&lt;p&gt;- etc&lt;p&gt;This allows them trace back through the history of each vehicle for debugging purposes.&lt;p&gt;They also applied this to the Space Shuttle software. This article from 1996 does an amazing job of describing the process: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&amp;#x2F;28121&amp;#x2F;they-write-right-stuff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&amp;#x2F;28121&amp;#x2F;they-write-right-stuff&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)</title><url>https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-we-dont-need-any-more-of-those/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_zamorano_</author><text>So I suposse building an aircraft involves standard bolts, procedures, testing and much more standarized ways.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;In the end, it&amp;#x27;s incredible these things didn&amp;#x27;t crash more often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goodcanadian</author><text>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&amp;#x27;t work out so well in practice.</text></comment>