Reddit reviews Safe Is Not an Option

The book Safe Is Not An Option speaks fairly eloquently about the need for wise risk management. Well worth reading.

That's the premise of Rand Simberg in his book Safe Is Not An Option.

In a trial and error learning process we will make mistakes and there will be loss of property and possibly life. If we can't accept that, we're done -- some will argue.

I partially agree. I think focusing on improving the robotic state of the art and robotically establishing infrastructure on other bodies can largely mitigate risk to human life. But you will still lose expensive payloads in a trial and error process.

Exactly.

The way I describe SLS is that for a long time, contractors worked to see how much money they could extract out of NASA while building the hardware that NASA would use to do interesting things (Apollo), slightly less interesting things (shuttle), and then mostly mundane (ISS).

Then the contractors realized that the only thing better than getting paid a ton of money to fly was getting paid a ton of money to not fly. Why should Boeing work hard to get SLS functional? It actually makes their work harder than continuing the delays, and it's not like being slow or making big mistake has cost them when it comes to incentives.

Have you read Simberg's "Safe is not an option"? It's a great discussion about taking risks when it's useful to do so, and not taking risks when you aren't doing anything interesting...

https://www.amazon.com/Safe-Not-Option-Rand-Simberg/dp/0989135519