The shuttle was a vehicle with vastly different capabilities, and technical challenges to overcome, compared to a Falcon rocket.

There have been 133 successful shuttle launches, and 2 failed ones.

There have been 27 successful Falcon launches, and 2 failed ones.

While true, NASA was able to have the shuttle program be so successful because of the things that they learned in the previous space programs. This is SpaceX's first space program. Don't compare a "senior" program to a "freshman" program.

Which is great advice - that should temper everyone's expectations of the firm (Which were sky-high a few days ago, when Musk was promoting his 'flight-tested' reused rockets.)

I think this is a false equivalence. Many if not most of the engineers working at SpaceX came from NASA or its constellation of contractors.

I know this will seem like nitpicking, but this was not a failed launch. It was during the inspection phase, which is performed to uncover flaws in the vehicle before launch. Small consolation I know because in this case the payload was lost anyway. But it's still important to note that the expectation of failure is going to be higher for inspection/static fire, and that in the case of commercial crew launches, the crew would not be near the pad at the time of static fire.

All that was intended by my comment was to shed light on what the parent comment probably was intending to say.

And one of the Shuttle failures was actually on landing

> And one of the Shuttle failures was actually on landing

Reentry, not landing.

Interesting question of how you'd classify that.

A design flaw (foam) under launch stress resulted in foam shedding and leading edge wing impacts damaging tiles and ensuring loss of the vehicle on reentry.

I'd argue the failure was in design, triggered during launch, and manifested on reentry. But Columbia was doomed from seconds into flight.

The Falcon only has to solve the problem of getting the payload into orbit. The Shuttle had to both get payload into orbit and return its crew (and the Orbiter, and any return payload) safely to Earth (the Dragon capsule has to do this as well but the statistics given are for all Falcon launches). So as far as comparing the technical challenges involved with Falcon vs. the Shuttle, the Shuttle was solving a harder problem, which I think makes the numbers for the Shuttle look even better relative to the Falcon.

Harder at least as in there are extra steps that can go wrong (re-entry + landing), I suppose it’s debatable which was really a more difficult engineering project…

That figure's low by a factor of 100 for the Space Shuttle program.

Specifically referring to the cost of the orbiter vehicle itself (or the cost you'd incur building a replacement if you lost one), roughly $2 billion is a decently accurate figure. The shuttle program as a whole, yes, is drastically more expensive.

"The Space Shuttle Endeavour, the orbiter built to replace the Space Shuttle Challenger, cost approximately $1.7 billion." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl...

More like NSA/CIA/NRO spy satellites.