…but as you pointed out, the non-zero value is “vanishingly small.” So why such intense and prolonged furore over a vanishingly small probability, one that already is well within what is acceptable per engineering standards? Because the news media has whipped up the general public—and professionals in the aviation industry who ought to know better—into an irrational frenzy that has resulted in an absurd ad hoc set of standards when it comes to aerospace transportation—nothing short of perfection is acceptable. THAT is why NASA adopted a new and arbitrary standard for assessing Starliner, they couldn’t dare risk bringing the astronauts home because the slightest glitch would have triggered all kinds of accusations of irresponsibility and willful neglect and putting profit before human lives and corruption and… a CONGRESSIONAL HEARING. Oh Lord. Face it: if those astronauts had come home and two months later one of them died in a car crash on the New Jersey turnpike, we wouldn’t blink an eye; just another one of the not so vanishingly small number of 40,000 people who die EVERY YEAR in the U.S. in a motor vehicle transport. Is it because a human life when traveling in a car is so much less glamorous and worth nothing or because we are too stupid to see how we are being manipulated by the news media?