The New Right Stuff has to do with People Physics. It is the subsystem of the spaceship that involves the people who build it and fly in it. The equations are brutally complex (so much so that none have yet been devised).
Unfortunately, it is also this subsystem that has been at fault in nearly every fatal accident.
One of the hardest parts of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident was that it was a failure of my subsystem—the humans. It meant that we hadn’t learned the lessons deeply enough from the Challenger accident 17 years before.