Nobody can afford the best technology humanity has to offer. As one adds more 9's to the odds of success, the cost increases exponentially. There is no end to it.
"The best humanity has to offer" seems like a slippery concept. If something goes wrong in retrospect, you can always find a reason that it wasn't the "best". How would you determine if a thing X is the best? How do you know the best is a very different thing from a "high risk" scenario?
"The best humanity has to offer" just means that people put in a good faith effort to obtain the best that they were capable of obtaining given the resources they had. It's a fuzzy concept because there aren't necessarily objective measures of good, but I think we can agree that, for example, Boeing isn't creating the best products humanity has to offer at the moment, because they have a recent history of obvious problems being ignored.
> How do you know the best is a very different thing from a "high risk" scenario?
Going to space is inherently a high risk scenario.
As for whether what you have is the best you can have: you hire subject experts and listen to them. In the case of Challenger, the subject experts said that the launch should be delayed for warmer temperatures--the best humanity had to offer in that case was delaying the launch for warmer temperatures.
The problem is when people believe that other people should pay unbounded costs for their safety.
There is not a systemic problem with people paying too much for safety in the US. In every case where a law doesn't apply, the funders are the ones with the final say in whether safety measures get funded, and as such all the incentives are for too little money spent on safety. The few cases where laws obligate employers to spend money on safety, are laws written in blood because employers prioritized profits over workers' lives.
In short, your concern is completely misplaced. I mean, can you point out a single example in history where a company, went bankrupt because they spent too much money on keeping their workers safe? This isn't a problem that exists.
If you don't know why companies are going bankrupt, then you don't know that they're going bankrupt due to safety spending. So that's basically admitting your opinion isn't based in any evidence, no?
I cannot think of a more boring thing to debate. But I'm sure you'll be eager to tell me that in fact I can think of more boring things to debate, since it's so important to you that superlatives be backed up with hard evidence.
It's definitely built in. The Apollo LM was .15mm thick aluminum, meaning almost any tiny object could've killed them.
The Space Shuttle flew with SSRB's that were solid-fuel and unstoppable when lit.
Columbia had 2 ejection seats, which were eventually taken out and not installed on any other shuttle.
Huge risk is inherently the deal with space travel, at least from its inception until now.
Astronauts (and anyone intelligent who intentionally puts themselves in a life-threatening situation) have a more nuanced understanding of risk than can be represented by a single % risk of death number. "I'm going to space with the best technology humanity has to offer keeping me safe" is a very different risk proposition from "I'm going to space in a ship with known high-risk safety issues".