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That kinda explains why NASA projects are always outright petrified at the idea of accepting -any- risk at all.
by WWLink 7y ago
That kinda explains why NASA projects are always outright petrified at the idea of accepting -any- risk at all.
- lisper 7y agoTo be fair, a lot of NASA's risk aversion stems from the fact that their work is very capital intensive. Even a cheap spacecraft costs many hundreds of millions of dollars, so failures can be very, very expensive. Also, in the case of the manned program, human lives are at risk.
- ethbro 7y agoNASA risk aversion seems directly related to their patrons' priorities. What's the cost of NASA not going to the moon yet? Zero. What's the cost of NASA failing at going to the moon? Large. Consequently: the organization optimizes to avoid failure at all costs, even at the cost of minimizing success. On the other hand, what was the cost of 1960s NASA of not going to the moon? Large. The cost of failure? Large, but slightly less. Result: we went to the moon.