Engineering, physical principles, I guess. Those who place bets or making predictions may know a thing or two on mechanics, rocket science and history of building launchers.
To put a finer point on it, those seem like rather blunt instruments for prediction compared to how risk is typically measured by aerospace reliability engineers.
Think of it like top down budget va bottom up budget.
RAMS engineers do a bottom up analysis. However, it is fairly typical for the to be subtlety biased in a way that changes the final answer. (Usually by ‘rounding up’ on individual hazards).
Top down takes an outside view and says ‘this looks like these other past projects. It should land in around the same place.’
I’ve found top down tends to be more accurate project wise. Bottom up more accurate for specific subsystems.
Related to this discussion, the results found by Feynman in the Challenger investigation found that the top-down risk assessment was off by orders of magnitude.
I'm sure some aerospace professionals are wondering how it's possible to predict stock behavior on an exchange, but have no problem with educated predictions of launcher performance.
That right. The point being, they are very different systems with different information inputs. Meaning what works for one may not be a good method the the other.
