To point out that the cost of exploration is not measured merely in equipment, budgets, or man-hours. If a man, a company or a nation sets out to explore, disaster is one coin that must be paid and paid often. Columbus knew this fact and knew it well. School children know that he took three ships with him in 1492. Without the triple redundancy, he would not have made it back home.
History is filled with tales of men and women pushing into the unknown and never returning.
Often they disappear with few lessons to be learned by those who followed, but sometimes the cause of their demise is learned by later explorers. When Mountain Men exploring the American West viewed the bleached bones of a fellow fur-trapper lying by the side of a desert water hole, they were little tempted to taste the water. When a new wing arrangement disintegrated in flight, few airplane designers would trust their lives to a similar wing. Unlike civilization where mistakes tend to dampen out, on a frontier there is little if any infrastructure to provide support when things go awry. Frontiersmen, as a result, tended to be extremely self-reliant and carried all they needed or thought they might need.