No, it's a pathological NASA problem. It does involve Congress and the public indirectly, since they're both terrible at statistics and mission failures have a

No, it's a pathological NASA problem. It does involve Congress and the public indirectly, since they're both terrible at statistics and mission failures have a huge impact on NASA's budget. Mission success has diminishing returns at about 80% chance of success so (as an example), NASA can spend $250 million on a mission with an 80% chance or $500 million for a 95% chance. The probability of two $250 million missions failing is 4% but the public only looks at the absolute number of failures instead of absolute number of successful missions or their cost so NASA decades ago learned to err on the side of extreme caution for self survival. This style of risk management has trickled down across the entire agency, compounded by pork barreling, so now pretty much everything NASA does is done as a one off trying to optimize for least number of total failures at the expense of productivity.