Jim Bennett says that it’s not always as obvious at the time what should be done, as it is later to the Monday-morning quarterbacks. He compares the Titanic to the World Trade Center. And to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938.

One example he points out is relevant to space (you knew I was going to talk about how this is relevant to space, didn’t you?)

Today we ask, “How could Titanic not have enough lifeboats for everybody?” But at the time, it was assumed that lifeboats were only usable in a minority of scenarios, and in most of those scenarios the boats would be used to evacuate passengers from a slowly-sinking ship to another ship, making multiple trips. The general assumption was that it was more productive to concentrate on making the ship as robust as possible. Similarly today we do not design airliners with military-style ejection pods, like those used on bombers, but rather concentrate on making the aircraft as robust as possible.

And similarly, we didn’t design the Shuttle for ejection–the design goal was to make such an eventuality unnecessary, because it was unaffordable to put in that capability. It would have added a lot of extra weight to the vehicle, sacrificing payload, and it would have had a dramatic impact on functionality of the system as planned.

The problem with that philosophy was that they didn’t just save money on the crew-escape system–they also scrimped on the reliability, by using multi-segment solids, instead of liquid boosters, and in not providing adequate testing of the system, because it was too expensive to fly, as designed.

But the lesson is not that manned space transports must have ejection seats–it’s that we need to truly design them to not require them, just as we do airliners.