Upon each encounter with uncertainty, a given engineer will choose the more conservative path, meaning that he or she will assume the worst-case scenario. Then the engineer who comes next does the same thing and also assumes the worst. So I suspected that our aerothermal environment wasn’t going to be quite as bad as it was assumed to be, and I had hopes of being able to persuade some of our team’s aerothermal-domain experts to let go of the conservatism that had been baked in.
