PAPod 590 - Gird Your Loins: NASA, Risk, and the Return of Recrudescence

Todd interviews Professor David Woods about recent NASA mishaps and a growing cultural shift toward "cheaper, faster" decision-making that sacrifices safety. They explore how past safety gains have lost vitality, highlight cascading modern risks (the "messy nine"), and argue for mutual assistance and revitalized resilience practices. Wood's most recent writing on this is available in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists called: Cheaper, Faster, and Who Gives a Damn about Anything Else. The episode connects space, aviation, cloud outages, and AI-driven engineering to show why coordinated foresight and cross-disciplinary cooperation are essential to prevent far-reaching harm in today’s complex systems.

You can listen to PAPod 590 - Gird Your Loins: NASA, Risk, and the Return of Recrudescence online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

PAPod 590 - Gird Your Loins: NASA, Risk, and the Return of Recrudescence is an episode from PreAccident Investigation Podcast by Todd Conklin.

This episode is 59:10 long.

This episode was published on Mar 21, 2026.

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