America has been craving safety since 9/11, and it has made cowards of everybody, so in some sense I would agree.

But taking a risk regarding an unknown or to expand knowledge or actually accomplish something is one thing. Ignoring known and mitigable risks just to save money, save face, meet a deadline or please a bureaucrat is another.

Anyway these clowns even fail your criterion, because by covering up the results of the first launch/experiment, they are not being up front about a risk.

In my opinion this is a top-down, human hierarchy thing. CEOs and agency administrators create and set an organization's culture and expectations.

The irony is that a faulty heat shield is an engineering challenge that real engineers would love to tackle; all you have to do is turn them loose on the problem, let them fix it. They live for that. I find it actually aesthetically offensive that the organization and its culture has instead taught them venal, circumspect careerism, which is cowardice of a different kind.