I doubt it's about what the astronauts themselves would consent to. It's about congressional hearings, what the talking heads on MSNBC and Fox News would say, and what all of that might mean for the lives and careers of many thousands of additional people who have no intention of going into space themselves.

I suspect the risk avoidance is simply a political necessity. In the US, ever since the Apollo program ended NASA has to fight for their budget, they can't afford highly public deaths for fear of entire programs being cancelled.

Meanwhile Russia's space program is mostly noteworthy for being a reliable launch provider with one of the most reliable rockets ever built. With no budget for bigger ambitions and little competition until recently there was no incentive to change anything.

I would argue the bigger handicap is the resource constraint for large projects - from lack of funding as well as lack of resources since the major sources Of taxable income (Amazon, Apple, etc) don’t pay tax.

Resources are a choice. Nobody ever did a cost-benefit assessment for the trillion dollars of Iraq war.

(Arguably the space programme worked as a proxy war with the Soviet Union; America didn't want to let the Russians ""invade"" the moon first.)

Apologies - not sure I understand. But I think I agree that societies choose how to distribute their resources?