There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them.
Feynman's Appendix F should be required reading for every sort of engineer: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...
It's a little bit long, and gets a bit technical at some points, but everyone should read it anyway.
But if during the Challenger investigation an engineer or a manager had told Feynman "There are place and time for failure. Failure on a launch operation isn't one of them", he would have regarded them as completely incompetent and part of the problem.
The very nature of the enterprise is risky, and so the goal was to manage the risk of failure to an acceptable limit. Cover-your-ass culture can be improved, engineers can be allowed to do their jobs, but you aren't going to eliminate risk. The fact that we can even try to put a number like "1 in 50" or "1 in 100" on estimated space flight failure rates is exactly what blhack is talking about. We could judge that too high a rate, but if we did, we wouldn't be going to space at all, at least not anytime soon. That's the tradeoff.
Note that the engineers and especially the astronauts were well aware of that risk, and you can find almost exactly that sentiment echoed by them in interviews after the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia accidents. Many astronauts were most worried that the American public couldn't stomach the idea that failure came with any ambition in spaceflight and so would shut the program down.
They are not the same. Furthermore if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk, which would then be a failure in the second sense of the term.
That is not the same as what blhack wrote, "If you're failing, you're doing something right."
you: zero failures = doing something wrong
blhack: any failure = doing something right
blhack's statement is clearly ridiculous.
blhack's comment was ambiguous. Under some interpretations it is ridiculous, but under others it is sensible. By interpreting charitably, we can avoid a fair bit of two of the worst things on HN: abrasiveness and nitpicking.
(Edit: and protracted disputes. So, three of the worst things on HN.)
In context, what I am saying is pretty obviously meant to be taken as:
Failure is part of taking risk. Risk is part of doing things that are difficult. Doing things that are difficult is part of progress. Progress is something that I consider "right".
And then put further into context, with regards to spectacular failures like the one today: Don't beat yourself up [engineers who worked on orbital] because the very difficult thing that you were doing failed. That is what makes that very difficult thing noteworthy.
This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.