[fbender]

If you talk space, the difference is that all relevant people were and are aware of the risks and do their job despite them. And they do their job in such a way that the risk is always minimized (through extensive preparation, Monitoring, …), you can handle a situation immediately or even recover from it (e.g. redundancy; failure detection, isolation, & recovery mechanisms; etc) and learn from it (post-mortem processes). Everything and everyone breathes risk awareness.

If you are talking aeronautics, the situation is fundamentally similar but also the scales are very different (also in terms of operating personnel vs. throughput). But more importantly, society in the majority seemed to have accepted a level of risk even though we know for sure that the next catastrophic event could happen any moment.