Keith Cowing disagrees with (retiring) John Young’s comments (valid, in my opinion) that it’s time to accept the risk of the Shuttle and start flying again:

…to just throw up your hands, as Young has done, and say nothing has changed – and that its not worth the effort to try and get better – is defeatism of the first order. It is curious that he feels this way when you recall that a contemporary of his, Gene Kranz, coined the phrase “failure is not an option”.

It’s not defeatism–it’s realism. Shuttle’s safety flaws are intrinsic, and really unfixable for the most part, without spending much more money on it than a new, much better launch system would cost. I’ve always believed that the CAIB recommendations about what was needed to return to flight were unrealistic, and at some point NASA (and the administration) will have to admit to that as well, or stop flying. We know we’re going to retire it (so we don’t have to husband the resource of orbiters as hard as we have in the past), and we’ve got plenty of astronauts willing to fly it, so we should either start flying it again and getting some use out of it, or shut the whole thing down and apply the savings toward something with a future. As it is now, we’ve the worst of both worlds–spending billions on it every year, with no activity at all other than trying to put lipstick on a pig.

As for the quote about failure not being an option, it all sounds very inspiring, but like the Kennedy quote of “because it’s hard,” it doesn’t really make much sense when one actually parses it. As someone once said, when failure isn’t an option, success gets pretty damned expensive. If we can’t take risks, there’s no point in even attempting to venture into the cosmos.