I don't disagree with any of that, but there's a big difference between the risk of injury & the risk of death; some people just go a bit far.
@ newrider: It's funny you should mention those achievements as, without one, we wouldn't have reached the next. As for sending a man into space; they sent a monkey & a dog first. The logic being if the dog or the monkey didn't survive, there was no way a human was gonna do it.
In the 18 months of construction of the Empire State Building in 1930, there were no safety harnesses or nets or pretty much any safety equipment & there were iron workers walking along I beams 80 storeys up but only 6 men died. Was that due to skill, the amout of care taken by the workers or just dumb luck?