[Gibbon1]

> There was also a bit of self-delusion going on.

What I think is interesting is how you could judge the success of the Apollo missions. One one hand they succeeded if your willing to ignore the Apollo 1 fire. But as I referenced the four critical failures. I think sober hindsight paints a picture of luck on the ragged edge.

One thing though I I think one needs to be aware of how risk gets amortized over time. Airliners are in heavy service and so the catastrophes due to design and operation holes is atomized over a lot of flights, where the shuttle never really was ever anything more than a few prototypes. Consider Boeing's first three 787's. Boeing planned to sell those but they've been written off. One can guess why.