Risk management is a more realistic term than safety. It implies that hazards are ever-present, that they must be identified, analyzed, evaluated and controlled or rationally accepted.
Every accident, no matter how minor, is a failure of the organization.
The alleviation of human error, whether design or intrinsically human, continues to be the most important problem facing aerospace safety.
Of the major incentives to improve safety, by far the most compelling is that of economics. The moral incentive, which is most evident following an accident, is more intense but is relatively short lived.
In less than 70 hours, three astronauts will be launched on the flight of Apollo 8 from the Cape Kennedy Space Center on a research journey to circle the moon. This will involve known risks of great magnitude and probable risks which have not been foreseen. Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1.5 million systems, subsystems and assemblies. With 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects. Hence the striving for perfection and the use of redundancy which characterize the Apollo program.
Columbus did not know where he was going, how far it was, nor where he had been after his return. With Apollo, there is no such lack of information. Nevertheless, the flight will involve risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.
