It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".
We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".
The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.
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.
> 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.
Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)
If you're looking for programs where mistakes were not made, Apollo is not the program to choose. I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center some time where they go in-depth on how close it came to never happening after Apollo I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.
I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems.
If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:
It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.
There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.
Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.
It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.
I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally engineers who were better at office politics than engineering, or just business majors etc.
So you have a group of really talented people using their talents to do awesome things, and then you have some useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses, running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to recognize when they should listen to the brains of their operation. All they care about is looking good to their superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've decided to set for no damn reason etc.
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