Culture of Caution

This is a tough post to write because I am a big supporter of the United States having a strong, successful manned space program that safely brings its astronauts home safely after every mission. I am concerned that following Columbia, we've entered an era of CYA at NASA. Space travel is a high risk endeavor. If you go to Wikipedia and look at the entries for the Apollo missions, a lot of them had problems that were much, much more significant than the problems on the underside of this space shuttle. Those Apollo problems were not treated like they were the end of the world; instead, they were just taken care of without great fan fare (Apollo 13 excepted). My concern is that NASA has taken on a culture of caution which is leading to them acting in a way that covers their asses rather than a very determined "get it done" manner. People who cover their asses are risk averse. People who just get things done are willing to take risk on their shoulders and find a way to get things taken care of. Manned space travel will always be a high risk venture, and if we have risk averse ass coverers running the show, it isn't going to work very well.