and act like "acceptable loss" is OK.
KC or Kalpana Chawla was a friend and "internal customer" of mine while I worked at NASA. She had an office 3 doors down from me. We were all so proud when she joined the astronaut core.

And her death, in fact ALL of the Shuttle disaster deaths, were entirely preventable.
The Space Shuttle was a goddam prototype that never should have been put into routine service. Everybody that worked on it knew that. It was Gemini to the Apollo project ( and even Apollo suffered a disaster that caused NASA to re-engineer a lot of things for the later Apollo missions ). The Shuttle suffered from a lack of funding to re-engineer and solve the issues that WE FUCKING KNEW ABOUT before Challenger... never mind Columbia.
The multi-segment SRBs with the O-rings that failed were never in the original design. A different firm located on the east coast was selected to produce single segment SRBs that could be shipped to Kennedy via the intercoastal waterway, ONE FUCKING SENATOR ( Orin fucking Hatch ) would not approve of a budget for NASA until we changed to use Morton Thiokol and the segmented SRB because they had to ship the segments on rail cars from Utah. Everyone knew it was inherently unsafe. And some of the blame goes to NASA management for allowing this.
As for the Columbia disaster, we already knew that ice formed on the external tank during fueling... and that the ice would break and hit the tiles on the shuttle during launch. There were many proposals to solve this issue but again, Congress would not give us the funds to fix it nor would NASA management pause operations. So my friend and co-worker died.
I am all for Space exploration... I could have made much more money than I did working for NASA. But I wanted to serve my country like my father and brother before me only I was born with a heart condition that prevented me from my dream of being a submarine captain in the Navy, I was even selected by Bob Dole ( of all people ) to go to Annapolis before my heart condition was discovered.