Prestige projects hide engineering risk

Visible, state‑backed 'flagship' projects (like R101) concentrate political will and public attention, which can compress schedules, mute dissent, and obscure technical shortcomings until a failure forces abrupt policy reversal. The collapse of a single high‑profile project often ends whole sectors or national strategies, not because the technology is impossible but because the political tolerance for iterative failure is absent. — Recognizing this dynamic helps explain why governments pick some technologies to back and why failures produce sweeping policy shifts — a useful lens for current debates about megaprojects, AI, space, and energy buildouts.