Most of the companies building next-generation commercial spaceflight vehicles to carry humans to space are drawing on the rich and sometimes sensitive database generated by NASA's 30-year history flying the space shuttle, with the expectation it will help them save money and lives as they build reusable spacecraft for a marketplace in low Earth orbit and beyond. All of the engineering teams developing human-space-flight vehicles except the one at Blue Origin have discussed forensic evidence on crew survivability garnered from the Columbia accident investigation, according to one of the physician/astronauts who studied exactly what killed the orbiter's seven crewmembers. Lessons from that 2003 accident, the loss of Challenger in 1986, and from flying and reflying the space shuttle through all 135 of its missions can help those developing new reusable spacecraft avoid some of the mistakes of their predecessors when they designed the orbital spaceplane in the 1970s, says an experienced shuttle mission director and program manager who is helping apply them to the new vehicles.
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