"That's on them" is not acceptable for an engineer when lives are on the line. Part of your job is making people understand what they need to understand. If their lack of understanding means people die, then you need to do your job and figure out how to communicate effectively to the audience you have, not the audience you want.
There’s a famous speech someone related from their civil engineering professor, where the professor basically said, if I pass you in this class I am effectively giving you a license to kill. So some of you will not be passing.
My CS undergrad was in the engineering college and so I had a mandatory engineering seminar that was basically "don't get people killed with your work." We covered Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and some other classic failures. I've mostly avoided working on life-critical software so it's not an immediate concern, but that sense of responsibility still stuck with me.
Also attended an engineering school. I had to take way too much chem and physics. It was weird.
I can be kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to details so I’ve worked on a couple such projects. It’s sobering, but also I think, “better me than” half a dozen corner cutters at my last two jobs. They could do much worse.
That said, I stayed on a commercial aerospace project about 14 months after I didn’t really want to be there because people kept saying the wrong things in meetings and thinking they sounded right.
The assumption of competency goes both ways. The NASA personnel should have been able to understand a very standard slide in their field, that any college-educated fluent English speaker would have been able to grasp.
People with a high school level education should not have been making life and death decisions about the Space Shuttle.
First of all, is that actually their level of education or are you just making stuff up?
Second, that's irrelevant to my point that the engineer is responsible for communicating, not just figuring stuff out. You cannot say "if you don't get it, that's your problem" when their not getting it means people die.
The slide in the OP is a completely standard way of commumicating information in the aerospace industry. If the NASA personnel had problems understanding this slide, then they also had problems understanding virtually every other piece of technical info that was ever communicated to them by a third party. College level reading comprehension means being able to understand nuance, which this slide conveys.
All you're doing here is convincing me that this wasn't a one-off and the aerospace industry has a pervasive problem with communication.
The average IQ and level of English proficiency is much higher in aerospace than it is building web apps.
Manifestly the high IQ and English proficiency in aerospace does not extend to the ability of making slides that are not completely a mess