A lot of people give NASA crap for delayed multi-billion dollar initiatives, saying things like "why could we do it 50 years ago, but not today with our almost

A lot of people give NASA crap for delayed multi-billion dollar initiatives, saying things like "why could we do it 50 years ago, but not today with our almost infinitely more powerful technological resources." However, these discussion are never balanced with the seemingly equal magnitude increase in human safety standards (hence lower risk tolerance) because we know much more about physiology, and have much finer-grained undertsanding of system design and reliability - and the statistical risks they reveal. Not to mention the impact of the collective national psychological horror that we remember of losing a human crew in a space mission. A lot of the risks we know of today are things that simply weren't known previously because the technology to characterise the risks to humans traveling to/in space just didn't exist. Now they do. So, the characterized risk is higher, and the effort to mitigate those risks costs much more (in both funding and time). Oh, and the complexity of hardware and software compound the problem. However, when funding is spent and teams are allowed to power through, the results are largely successful missions - like being able to fly a freaking UAV on Mars, or crew an international space station, or self assemble the massive Webb telescope using a maneuver with over 200 potential single points of failure. Perhaps the unspoken sentiment here is that people think we, as a species, should be braver and more risk tolerant? Personally, I'd like to see a report on the magnitude of investment versus the liklihood of mission success versus the resolution and breadth with which we can characterize risk.