> The public and decision makers react irrationally to any failure, putting funding for other missions and the entire program in jeopardy. NASA and ESA have to make some extremely suboptimal decisions to make sure that funding doesn’t get catastrophically cut.

Which, incidentally, is one of the key reasons SpaceX has had the success they have: they're set up to handle failure and avoid this politics. How many Starships have blown up? If Starship were a NASA program, how many explosions ago would it have been cancelled? And yet this approach to risk is pretty effective!