On talking to a few folks I know who work for NASA. Government officials in most areas are VERY averse to risk taking. Managing and sometimes working on a missi

On talking to a few folks I know who work for NASA. Government officials in most areas are VERY averse to risk taking. Managing and sometimes working on a mission with a fatal crash is likely the end of the career. Business as usual and not reaching far enough has no career downside. And safety is expensive -- getting the system from .99 to .999 P(success) leads to a large increase in complexity and makes developed technologies more difficult to reuse -- the systems designed for high P(success) are usually monolithic, tightly integrated, built for a single purpose things, not modular systems of reusable components. This has nothing to do with resource constraints; this is pre-conditioning / expectations that are not going to change for a large government organization. Unless there is a highly visible, universally accepted national need.