Well in the case of the Shuttle both accidents that killed people were due to previously identified failure modes. At the end of the day, risk will always be a number greater than 0%. At some point someone is going to have to make a judgement call that the risk is low enough to proceed, and sometimes that call is going to be wrong.
bumby|2 years ago
Mercury and Gemini both had good track records. Apollo and Shuttle, not so much.
Put differently, how much would you be willing to bet that their FMEA has caught literally every failure mode possible?
jjk166|2 years ago