Get a flat while riding a bike and you fix it, though you may never see the tack on the road that caused the puncture. However on the failure of a space mission, the whole aerospace industry might be left scratching their heads as to what happened and why. David Harland and Ralph Lorenz in their book Space Systems Failures lay down the known space failures before the reader in great detail and full disclosure. There's the occasional rescue of launcher payloads that slightly lighten this otherwise negative subject, but from the number and variety of faults they leave no doubt that space ventures are more a gamble than a certainty.