The space shuttle program was doomed from the start because it was designed as a manned vehicle. Unlike Starship, it couldn't fly unmanned.
Shuttle had to fly humans, and had to maintain its human-rated safety certification. This meant that any design change or modification had to be tested extensively to ensure it didn't kill the crew. This took multiple design iterations, took a long time, and was not cheap.
After the initial design of the ship, it made the program very risk averse. Changing anything required a lot of testing, so it was easier to not change it. Shuttle got stuck because it became too difficult and expensive to iterate; Congress did not give NASA enough funds to overcome this, so the project stagnated.
Because Starship flies without humans on board, it doesn't have these issues. SpaceX can make radical design changes, perform minimal testing, then put these changes on the next flight and immediately see what happens. Sometimes this fails catastrophically, which is the main reason why Starship keeps blowing up. They can also push the ship close to failure to see how it performs, without worrying about humans on board. This is why Starship burned up multiple times when returning from orbit - SpaceX intentionally ran the ship through excessively steep reentry profiles to measure how the heat shield performed.
The overall result is that SpaceX can iterate on Starship faster and more cheaply than NASA ever could with Shuttle.
Human rating was more of a PR issue. The value of the human lives on the orbiter was much less than the value of the orbiter itself. So the cost of an accident would not have been significantly reduced by making it unmanned.
Shuttle's real problem was it was just an uneconomical design. It was foolish to expect government and its cost-plus contractors to be able to optimize for cost.
(Of course this got downvoted because people are unrealistic about the value of human lives. To pretend they don't have finite value leads to absurd results.)
I see your point financially, however you’re just undervaluing the cost of highly-public deaths then. If a couple missions in a row for any manned program resulted in astronauts being incinerated, it costs the full future value of whole program, because astronauts won’t go on it anymore and the public will also demand its end.
Right, that's a PR issue. It's ultimately because the space program is not actually producing much of tangible value, but rather a perception of value. A program that is producing airy PR is vulnerable to bad PR.
The government has no problem with programs producing tangible value that also cost lives. Consider the military, police, search and rescue, and really any activity where people do anything with nonzero risk. The lives lost are part of the cost.
[−]true_religion · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:13 UTC ·
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Right. If the space shuttle was crucial to national security or even financial success, politicians would spare no expense in telling the public that blood needed be shed to protect the ongoing accumulation of wealth en infinitum.
But since it's a science project more akin to basic research than anything with a ROI formula attached, then even one death is one death too many.
One death isn't too many. It's a matter of too high a probability of general random catastrophe.
Example: Astronaut Tim goes on an EVA to perform an emergency repair after a micrometeorite damaged the space station. A malfunction of his space suit kills him. Everyone agrees that Tim died a hero doing a high-risk activity that needed to be done, and almost no one would say it means we can't do spacewalks or can't send astronauts to space anymore.
Compare to Challenger or Columbia: The whole crew dies randomly on the way up or down during a routine mission. A program which became known for having like, a 10% chance of that happening would be horrifying (in my opinion).
[−]RhodesianHunter · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:51 UTC ·
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I sure hope you never work on anything where human lives are in the balance.
> the cost of an accident would not have been significantly reduced by making it unmanned
> people are unrealistic about the value of human lives
Which one is it?
Given 2 is true and extreme, politics dominates all, and anyone acting like you would have been thrown out of political power as fast as possible. So no, "the cost of" does not pertain only to materiel and technical development, etc.
> Human rating was more of a PR issue
And this was demonstrative in limiting efficiencies and iteration, as OP was explaining. He stated the reasons it failed; you're countering with your idealism around why it shouldn't have failed, while inadvertently confirming the various reasons it did.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:55 UTC ·
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Oh... you just met a big space shuttle nerd.
This is not true... The shuttle mission was highly automated. Launch, orbit, reentry was all automated. They only needed human pilots to land on the runway because their algo's weren't good enough. Which, again, was one of many design failures of the shuttle. Having humans on board only slightly increased the chance of success according to nasa. other failures were their ablative heat shield ontop of the ceramica, the carbon-on-carbon plating around the aluminum housing, using aluminum as the body and fins instead of steel, AND DROPPING THEIR BOOSTERS IN THE FUCKING OCEAN.
As opposed to dropping them in the desert or a town? The risk appetite was not there at all to figure out safe capture of the boosters. And if they had the allowance to tackle that problem, it would have been better focussed on improving the shuttle itself, fixing the problems GP has outlined.
Of all the issues, "dropping their boosters in the fucking ocean" probably doesn't even make top 10.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:20 UTC ·
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i'm talking about recovery. They couldn't because they caught it with parachutes.
Again, stage zero is a huge enegineering challange and issue that Nasa didn't even attempt to solve because it was too hard.
Buran proved there was no technical obstacle to uncrewed runway landing, the US could have achieved it a few years earlier if it was a priority. The Buran landing system was more complex than you might expect, and proved to be pretty adaptable in its only orbital flight.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:03 UTC ·
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no, you missed what i said. Having humans only slightly improved the odds of mission success... Meaning they did have algorithms to autonomously land on a runway.. They chose not to.
Shuttle had to fly humans, and had to maintain its human-rated safety certification. This meant that any design change or modification had to be tested extensively to ensure it didn't kill the crew. This took multiple design iterations, took a long time, and was not cheap.
After the initial design of the ship, it made the program very risk averse. Changing anything required a lot of testing, so it was easier to not change it. Shuttle got stuck because it became too difficult and expensive to iterate; Congress did not give NASA enough funds to overcome this, so the project stagnated.
Because Starship flies without humans on board, it doesn't have these issues. SpaceX can make radical design changes, perform minimal testing, then put these changes on the next flight and immediately see what happens. Sometimes this fails catastrophically, which is the main reason why Starship keeps blowing up. They can also push the ship close to failure to see how it performs, without worrying about humans on board. This is why Starship burned up multiple times when returning from orbit - SpaceX intentionally ran the ship through excessively steep reentry profiles to measure how the heat shield performed.
The overall result is that SpaceX can iterate on Starship faster and more cheaply than NASA ever could with Shuttle.
Shuttle's real problem was it was just an uneconomical design. It was foolish to expect government and its cost-plus contractors to be able to optimize for cost.
(Of course this got downvoted because people are unrealistic about the value of human lives. To pretend they don't have finite value leads to absurd results.)
The government has no problem with programs producing tangible value that also cost lives. Consider the military, police, search and rescue, and really any activity where people do anything with nonzero risk. The lives lost are part of the cost.
But since it's a science project more akin to basic research than anything with a ROI formula attached, then even one death is one death too many.
Example: Astronaut Tim goes on an EVA to perform an emergency repair after a micrometeorite damaged the space station. A malfunction of his space suit kills him. Everyone agrees that Tim died a hero doing a high-risk activity that needed to be done, and almost no one would say it means we can't do spacewalks or can't send astronauts to space anymore.
Compare to Challenger or Columbia: The whole crew dies randomly on the way up or down during a routine mission. A program which became known for having like, a 10% chance of that happening would be horrifying (in my opinion).
Assigning a finite value to human lives (in the US, it's around $12M) is absolutely essential to evaluating policy tradeoffs.
> people are unrealistic about the value of human lives
Which one is it?
Given 2 is true and extreme, politics dominates all, and anyone acting like you would have been thrown out of political power as fast as possible. So no, "the cost of" does not pertain only to materiel and technical development, etc.
> Human rating was more of a PR issue
And this was demonstrative in limiting efficiencies and iteration, as OP was explaining. He stated the reasons it failed; you're countering with your idealism around why it shouldn't have failed, while inadvertently confirming the various reasons it did.
This is not true... The shuttle mission was highly automated. Launch, orbit, reentry was all automated. They only needed human pilots to land on the runway because their algo's weren't good enough. Which, again, was one of many design failures of the shuttle. Having humans on board only slightly increased the chance of success according to nasa. other failures were their ablative heat shield ontop of the ceramica, the carbon-on-carbon plating around the aluminum housing, using aluminum as the body and fins instead of steel, AND DROPPING THEIR BOOSTERS IN THE FUCKING OCEAN.
As opposed to dropping them in the desert or a town? The risk appetite was not there at all to figure out safe capture of the boosters. And if they had the allowance to tackle that problem, it would have been better focussed on improving the shuttle itself, fixing the problems GP has outlined.
Of all the issues, "dropping their boosters in the fucking ocean" probably doesn't even make top 10.
Again, stage zero is a huge enegineering challange and issue that Nasa didn't even attempt to solve because it was too hard.