This makes a lot of sense in one way, but the weird thing is that it's not just the astronaut's own lives that we have to consider. Personally, I've had some r

This makes a lot of sense in one way, but the weird thing is that it's not just the astronaut's own lives that we have to consider. Personally, I've had some risky hobbies. I accepted the risk, and if I'd died doing them, I might have gotten in the local newspaper, but nothing beyond that. The Challenger explosion was a moment that defined a generation. Some of that was that Christa McAuliffe was supposed to talk to millions of kids once she got into orbit, but some was just what people projected onto the astronauts generally. When the three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire, no one shed a tear for the 30,000 man-years of effort that went into making the rocket that was destroyed. The effect was about the men themselves, who were considered national heroes, and also what it might have said about the United States that those men died. Maybe we should treat this differently. Maybe in prior ages of exploration, we did. Back then we didn't have live TV or the internet though that could capture our emotion in the same way, and also in prior ages, not all expeditions were as closely connected with the nation itself.