One really wonders about the competence of the committee which was selecting climbers for the fatal attempt.
We have send people to space in space-suits, which when under pressure would extend there arms and were no longer able to fold them back in. We know better now, but back then we didn't know. So the art to prepare for such "adventures" is very different to what we imagine. No endless information gathering, instead you select a person that can improvise on the spot with the spotty information you have. You give them tools to improvise: Knifes to cut the spacesuit open, duct-tape and rubber-tourniquets to keep the helmet pressurized. Not great, not terrible. Oh, and in hindsight, do the first spacewalk unmanned?
That is one of the incomprehensible things for me about the early pioneers of parachute technology. Why did people throw themselves off from the Eifel tower when they could have tested and perfected the jump with a sack of potatoes or sand?
Tangential, but I think there was just one incident, and the guy was considered a crackpot even when he was alive. They thought he was going to throw a dummy off, but against all advice he insisted on doing it himself.
Huh. Did we really do this without testing it in a vacuum chamber on the ground first?
That's not really what happened. There wasn't some committee deciding that Mallory and Irvine should go up that day - it was the result of health, weather, conditions, injuries, and politics inside the group. They were months of travel away from anything resembling a committee!
one wonders ...