Assuming that they know the right questions to ask. In most of my training sessions instructor would ask, “any questions?” Of course, the questions would come later, when we students tried to actually do what had been taught, because the experience was different than the training. It is difficult to know what the right questions are, and it is difficult to know when you have received the right answer. It is even more difficult when you are not familiar with the subject.

Thiokol’s Roger Boisjoly (the hero of the Challenger disaster) had seen serious damage on the January 1985 Shuttle launch (burnthrough of the first O-ring and damage to the second). He wrote a report to NASA, in March, explaining that it was acceptable to launch under similar cold conditions. The night before the final Challenger launch, Boisjoly tried to convince Thiokol and NASA to not launch, using mostly the same data and charts from the March report. NASA asked the right questions: which is correct; can we launch or not? Boisjoly did not supply the correct answer, which was that the previous March he had expected similar conditions to never reappear, so he gave a recommendation in his March report that matched the contractual requirements, not the physical reality, so that recommendation was wrong (meanwhile, he had convinced Thiokol and NASA to redesign the solid rocket boosters to have a third O-ring, but that design was not available in 1986).

Thiokol provided the wrong answer, and the cognizant engineers at NASA did not know that they had received the wrong answer.

Come to think of it, most of the cognizant engineers and managers at Thiokol did not realize that they had given the wrong answer.

There were other right questions to ask, that evening, but no one knew them at the time. Not even the cognizant engineers.

Maybe the difference is that in the Soviet Union it was the military who took care of the rocket things, while now Putin cares about money and “friends”, and that after the end of the cold war there are now such to be had in the space industry? So, like Napoleon he appoints his incompetent and harmless friends to head all of that: “-Oh yeah, sure, that’d be alright, sir! I’ll make you the first man to walk on the Moon. You will, I promise if I get the billio… I mean the job.”

I was married to a Russian. She was both highly intelligent and naive at the same time.