I think it might be insightful to read this report, I'm not sure that it was criminal negligence, I think it was more a problem with the culture at NASA at the time and specifically management's seeming loss of perspective with regards physical realities and lack of basic statistical and risk analysis.
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/sh... Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle
by R. P. Feynman

Introduction

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"

The remainder of the report is quite revealing.

Our future does not look very bright when one of the few sane comments on this completely ridiculous and idiotic idea is give a score of 1! Seems very few people here have actually bothered to do some very basic math and even fewer have a grasp of the laws of thermodynamics. You rock, Slashdotgirl! Damn right, without energy our current civilization is already doomed and we sure as hell don't and won't have enough to civilize the solar system.

Sounds to me as if Mr. Kalil wants a pony before he can take care of a hamster. I suggest that he first understand the implications of the exponential function and why growth as we know it today has an expiration date. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date You can follow Tom on his blog at http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

You might want to read Joseph Tainters' 'The Collapse of Complex Societies' Or watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"however you contextualize the problem, the root cause is faulty risk assessment...the entire notion of risk assessment in project management has become a clusterfuck of cause/effect errors & voodoo quantification of non-quant factors"

Indeed!

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"

Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle, by R.P. Feynman

Someone should tell the FAA to go fly a kite! What if someone should decide to do aerial photography from a kite and then sell the images? What? You don't think that could happen? http://xkcd.com/kite/ "I've checked FAA regulations, and it seems that as long as the kite is under five pounds I don't need to notify them before flights." Randall Munroe (xkcd) Of course there are kites and then there are 'KITES'... http://www.guinnessworldrecord... Richard P Synergy flew a kite to an altitude of approximately 4,422 m (14,509 ft) above the point of take-off on 12 August 2000 near Kincardine, Ontario, Canada. The massive kite, with an area of 25 m (270 ft), was designed and built by Synergy himself. At its maximum altitude the kite had 7.31 km (4.5 miles) of woven kevlar line connecting it to a winch on the ground. The record-breaking flight lasted 8 hr 35 min. The kite was a high tech delta, having 270 square feet of nylon kite skin, measuring 30 feet from wing tip to wing tip, and 18 feet tall, sporting hollow fiberglass spars 1.5 inches in diameter, flying on 270 pound woven Kvlar line 3/32 inch in diameter. It's a bird, it's a drone, nah it's a helicopter cat... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Never mind the FAA, PETA might have something to say about this one >;-)

Morsi came to power just as Egypt went from being an oil exporter to an oil importer. Mubark was able to pacify the masses by providing food and fuel subsidies because of Egypt's oil export revenue. In 2013 Egypt's oil imports increased by 39% http://mazamascience.com/OilEx... so those kinds of subsidies are gone forever. So it won't matter much who is in power because they won't be able to provide the cheap bread and the circus anymore. There are a lot of angry young men with not much to do over there. That doesn't bode well for the future. Also see'Export Land Model' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... "The Export Land Model, or Export-Land Model, refers to work done by Dallas geologist Jeffrey Brown, building on the work of others, and discussed widely on The Oil Drum.[1] It models the decline in oil exports that result when an exporting nation experiences both a peak in oil production and an increase in domestic oil consumption. In such cases, exports decline at a far faster rate than the decline in oil production alone. The Export Land Model is important to petroleum importing nations because when the rate of global petroleum production peaks and begins to decline, the petroleum available on the world market will decline much more steeply than the decline in total production." Countries that placed all their bets on finite resources being infinite might find themselves going through a bit of a rough patch from here on out.

http://xkcd.com/171/

"Outside small measurements and between large ones the foot is a cleaner measurement in my opinion." I guess that would depend on what you stepped in, before you started measuring.