This reminds me of a comment under the Asiana Flight 214 discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6012214, that outsider views can help. In this case, as in the case of the Mars Climate Orbiter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter), perhaps review of the work by someone who hasn't been scrutinizing it all day would have caught the errors? You stare at the same thing all day, and it's easy to get lost/not see your own mistakes. This can apply to supervisors, who might be inclined not to review their supervisees' work carefully because they always do such good work that it really doesn't occur to them that something this big could go wrong. And at the same time, they may well have been staring at it too long themselves.

And as an aside, isn't the Russian space program always "beleaguered"?