They did, yes. And there are fascinating failure stories for each one. But my point is that there were more miraculous successes than miraculous failures. Heck, in my opinion, given that the Space Shuttle flew in atmosphere like a brick, and given that there was no possible way to get a second shot at the landing strip, the fact that they landed successfully every time (except for Columbia, of course) is amazing.

The Apollo flights in particular were interesting. For example, in the case of Apollo 14, when Houston was literally reading new machine code to the astronauts over radio who were punching in POKE instructions by hand to change the code.