[mumblemumble]

Its predecessor launch system had 10 successes and 2 failures for the crewed flights. One, they got the crew home safely, but it was close. So that's a 17% failure rate and a 8% rate of failures killing the crew.

Not saying the Shuttle's success rate was awesome; I'm glad we demand more nowadays. But it still represented a pretty decent crew safety improvement for the USA's human spaceflight program.