> It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches

It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?

But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.

For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.

> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.

And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.

Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.

> It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?

This sounds more like there is money in the room than it’s about the money. None of the decision makers personally profited from saying go. It was much more of a prestige thing.

man, if you need 7 digits, call HP.