That said, it seems to me that the safety culture is a symptom, not an underlying cause, of the troubles that NASA is facing. Fundamentally, the political nature of NASA planning and acquisition drive NASA-designed systems toward complexity and high-performance. It is the complexity and performance of (especially) launch vehicles, combined with their stringent requirements and catastrophic failure modes that drives the safety culture. If they didn't obsess over safety, these monstrosities would fail every time.
Take a typical aerospace quality part that has $700 worth of material and labor in it. Because it is engineered with a factor of safety of, 1.05-1.2, for example, there is a $25-30,000 paper trail that documents the mine where the ore was extracted, who did the refining, what the heat treatment process was, where it was performed, and so on and so on ad infinitum ad nauseam.
Take the (awful) STS, for example. Congress was promised "airline-style" operations for this "space pickup truck." Well, an airliner has 0 mission-critical parts. A wing spar can fail and the skin should hold the wing together. The STS has over 700 mission-critical parts. For example, if an O-ring fails on a booster, everybody dies. If some foam hits the leading edge of the wing, everybody dies. High-perf mission-critical parts seem to be a result of the political need for the appearance of technology leadership.
I can almost guarantee you that the O-rings and leading edge pieces were manufactured in different states. High part-count is an artifact of the procurement process.
Elon Musk has talked about what makes SpaceX's pricing possible. (Note that they're offering launch services at 1/5 the cost of the shuttle.) He has a vertically integrated rocket factory. In one state. NASA could not build the Falcon 9 if it wanted to simply because they could not vertically integrate in one state. Every state would get a piece of the pie.
Algorithmically, because that's the crowd, here, you pay an exponential administrative cost for each of the factors: performance, lateral integration, and complexity. We've done all three.
NASA treats the fact that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built as a point of pride, for political reasons. It's actually our national shame and folly, and has set space access back 30 years.