> Indeed while putting a price on human life is extremely taboo, the fact is that in situations where such a price must be determined, it usually comes out to the low tens of millions of USD.

I think astronaut lives are much more expensive. I don't know how much the launch abort system costs but I suspect the overall budget more than makes up for the value of the lives of the crew if the crew was made of random people.

Astronauts are exceptional people, and their training is awefully expensive. Not only that but they are public figures. If an astronaut dies in a way that could have been prevented, public opinion will not be kind to those who "cheaped out", and since it is a government program and public opinion is everything in politics, the consequences will be huge.

Pricing human lives is taboo, an even more so if we consider that some lives are more valuable than others, but it has to be done, we can't make do risk analysis without doing that, and NASA probably did. I wonder what the number is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than a billion.