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.
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.