We had a better system. Launched all its satellite payloads pretty well. Only one Tracking and Data Relay Satellite was lost. Human cost was 14 of our best and brightest people over the launch system's lifetime. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-L and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107 .

NASA, and now picking up the ball DOD, decided to try and eliminate the human cost. The result, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37, just had a successful launch. Originally, it was to be launched from the shuttle (a shuttle within a shuttle), but the Columbia disaster changed that.

Other ideas still proceed, but slowly...

By banning wikileaks access, any subsequent access is therefore suspect. Also by banning access, any DNS lookup of www.wikileaks.org can set off the bells and whistles, even if the follow up is years later. Banning access reduces the number of leads to track down.

One of the keys to Cassini's success has been flexibility. Using fancy flying, NASA/ESA were able to save the payload Huygens probe mission, which had an almost fatal communications flaw.
The story has a hero, Boris Smeds, a Swedish radio engineer for the ESA, who pushed and pushed because he found out something was very wrong with the Huygens payload to be launched from Cassini probe.


Slashdot covered this well and humorously. See substitute links provided for 6 years of bit rot on URL's :-)
Saving Huygens

"Titan Calling: How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon"

and The story behind "Titan Calling"

For completeness sake, here is a NASA/JPL paper on "What we can do to fix the problem"
Resolving the Cassini/Huygens Relay Radio Anomaly

The paper's "lessons learned" are particularly important:

• Spacecraft subsystems must be tested to all of their requirements before launch (this would have helped Hubble Space Telescope, too).
• Keep engineering model and flight spares operational throughout the mission.
• Documentation of Spacecraft Hardware and testing.
  "It is important to keep proper documentation of all tests so this information is available when something goes wrong."
• Never intentionally throw away data in a deep space mission.
  Spacecraft systems need to have an appropriate level of reconfigurability in flight. "This anomaly would have been easy to solve if there has been even a modest amount of reconfigurability in the PSA."

Doppler Shift? What is this Doppler Shift thing you speak of? :-)

Permanent: means it lasts until ISS de-orbit in 2016. Yup, idiocy still planned. See: (In glorious PowerPoint)

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/386764main_09-15-09_Human_Spaceflight_Testimony.pdf

http://titan04.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/nexgen/Nexgen_Downloads/378555main_02-Sally_Charts_v11.ppt

Or just search via Google: for iss +"de-orbit" site:nasa.gov

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=iss+%22de-orbit%22+site%3Anasa.gov

In another instance,

wrote a loving modified dd that writes to multiple files and streams to multiple programs at the same time. The program, dcfldd, also introduces the sorely missed VERIFY operation, and even block-by-block hashes, ( dcfldd Man page)

Maybe someone will combine this with dd_rescue, ddrescue and dd_rhelp to make the ultimate "Convert and Copy" utility :-)

Ah and I can dream of SCTP support too :-)