Although that was not a failure of language safety, but an overflow issue. The software was designed successfully for another rocket, and was reused for a rocket that didn't match the original specification.
I disagree. The programmer is the expert in types, so it is the programmers duty to ensure that the possible values stored in a variable of a given type are compatible with the type selected. Particularly when it comes to these sort of critical applications.
Programmers blindly following specs put together by people who have no claim to expertise in these matters without questioning the assumptions behind the spec is the cause of all manner of disasters. And "but that's what the spec said to do" is all to common an excuse when the problem is with subtle runtime behavior issues that fall squarely in the programmer's ___domain of responsibility.
The software component in question was implemented according to its specification, and never failed in the environment for which it was developed, the Ariane 4.
The decision to re-use the component as-is in the Ariane 5 without sufficiently investigating the consequences of the higher horizontal velocities that it is subject to compared to the Ariane 4 cannot so obviously be blamed on the programmer that implemented it years before in a different context.
Thanks for the extra context, and alternate interpretation. You seem like you might know this story better than the writer of the referenced article, but you and the author seem to be making contradictory causal claims. I hold to my conclusion if the author's story is taken as authoritative. If yours is more authoritative, then it sounds like your conclusion is better.
I kind of took the story as an allegory when writing my comment. The article is quite vague about the details of the situation. And for all I know, it IS programmers that write specs for this European Space Agency unmanned rocket project. But the way the story is told aligns with a more universal experience of programmers blaming specs for the failings of programs, even when they should have recognized that the program was misspecified before implementing it. I ran with that interpretation because it was illustrative of something important, but it is not particularly surprising to me that the details are being questioned. The article was never a rock solid account.
http://www.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html
Although that was not a failure of language safety, but an overflow issue. The software was designed successfully for another rocket, and was reused for a rocket that didn't match the original specification.