Space Shuttle

From Nasa's site:

The space shuttle is the world's first reusable spacecraft, and the first spacecraft in history that can carry large satellites both to and from orbit. The shuttle launches like a rocket, maneuvers in Earth orbit like a spacecraft and lands like an airplane. Each of the three space shuttle orbiters now in operation -- Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour -- is designed to fly at least 100 missions. So far, altogether they have flown a combined total of slightly more than one-fourth of that.

Things that cost $250 million to reuse really shouldn't count as "reusable" except in the most desperate of circumstances.

More: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/basics/index.html

Software Quality

A fascinating article on how the shuttle software is developed and how they keep the bug-count to a record low. Oddly, the article claims that in the future *all* software will be written the same way. I doubt it. They admit it is very expensive. In the US, we must compete by being nearly cutting edge, because commodity stuff gets shipped overseas where labor is cheaper. Such an approach would only work on nearly commodity domains.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html