Why was this designed such that the failure of A SINGLE XXX would be catastrophic?
There are plenty of things in a rocket that can fail that would take the entire vehicle with it. Structural mechanics is pretty well understood and loads are well predictable, so it seems perfectly reasonable to me to design with the assumption that a part with a 10x safety factor will not fail.
If you didn't, your rocket would never get to orbit anyway.
There are plenty of things in a rocket that can fail that would take the entire vehicle with it. Structural mechanics is pretty well understood and loads are well predictable, so it seems perfectly reasonable to me to design with the assumption that a part with a 10x safety factor will not fail.
If you didn't, your rocket would never get to orbit anyway.