> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe.

Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.

The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.

Considering that driving (at least in the US) is a relatively unsafe means of travel compared to the alternatives, I can understand imploring someone to drive safe.

Our internal emotional thinking doesn't work very well with probabilities so it is a very common fallacy trying to reduce a probability to zero when it is completely irrational.

I feel like all the responses to your comment sort of prove its point.

As I was reading the post I was wondering along the same lines, if this is different from before. Going to space is an inherently risky activity. It's always going to be easy to write the "this is not safe" think piece, where you can either say "I told you so" or "Whew, thankfully we made it this time!" afterwards. Things like this only happen when you accept some risk and people say "yes" press forward.

All that said, not all risk is equal, and I'm trying to understand if NASA is uniquely dysfunctional now and taking needless, incidental risks.

America has been craving safety since 9/11, and it has made cowards of everybody, so in some sense I would agree.

But taking a risk regarding an unknown or to expand knowledge or actually accomplish something is one thing. Ignoring known and mitigable risks just to save money, save face, meet a deadline or please a bureaucrat is another.

Anyway these clowns even fail your criterion, because by covering up the results of the first launch/experiment, they are not being up front about a risk.

In my opinion this is a top-down, human hierarchy thing. CEOs and agency administrators create and set an organization's culture and expectations.

The irony is that a faulty heat shield is an engineering challenge that real engineers would love to tackle; all you have to do is turn them loose on the problem, let them fix it. They live for that. I find it actually aesthetically offensive that the organization and its culture has instead taught them venal, circumspect careerism, which is cowardice of a different kind.