[aeternus]

It's easy for us to past judgement in hindsight, but what is an acceptable failure rate? For Apollo, I believe it was around 7-8%. There's always going to be some risk, what you don't see is all the times those administrators correctly identified a risk as acceptable, or scrubbed a mission due to inaccurate risk assessment.

A space program that demands better than six-sigma risk for example is unlikely to ever get off the ground.

[OnlyOneCannolo]

Although I'm technically judging in hindsight since I wasn't there, I don't think I'm being unfair in my judgement. I have experience in safety and I've seen better and worse safety reviews than this one. Although there were plenty of external factors that pushed people to act the way they did, the people we're talking about were the responsible authority for vetting these issues. It was their job to take ownership of the issues and their inquiries, and they failed to conduct themselves appropriately.

Just because their mistake didn't push the failure rate past the acceptable limit doesn't absolve them of anything.