Comment by DavidPhillipOster on When programs have to work-- lessons from NASA · 2011-08-03T04:28:10.812Z · LW · GW

This very system was responsible for the failure of the first shuttle launch. It turns out that there was a 1/64 chance that the clocks in the primary system and the clocks in the BFS would fail to synchronize on startup, and the very first scheduled launch hit the jackpot: the clocks didn't sync, and NASA had to scrub the mission, and spend weeks figuring out what went wrong.