Hacker News Reader

There were 135 Shuttle missions flown. Two ended in disaster.

There is a huge difference between a 1.4% failure rate and a 40% failure rate.

NASA got a whole lot of science done with those missions.

But more missions would have been flown if the Shuttle was more reliable. This is a kind of survivorship bias where we don't know how many missions would have been flown with a different design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com