Thirty years ago this weekend, after a two and a half year stand down and an extremely difficult external- and self-examination of a lack of safety within the program, NASA succeeded in returning the Space Shuttle fleet to flight following the devastating loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger and her seven-member crew on the STS-51L mission.
Now, in a radically different era for spaceflight, NASA and its Commercial Crew partners in SpaceX and Boeing are striving to instill a culture of safety that looks beyond just the hard data and probabilistic risk assessment numbers – this as both providers say their vehicles now meet NASA’s 1-in-270 Loss Of Crew requirement benchmark.