Praying as an engineering methodology

CNN reported Monday, August 22, 2005 that Commander Eileen Collins of the Discovery space shuttle is relying on prayer to hold her ship together. She said:

"She [the widow of the Columbia shuttle commander] was praying for us -- everybody was praying for us. That's another reason I knew we were safe."

But why didn't this 'praying' (i.e. quiet wishful thinking to oneself with no external motion or action taken) work on the Challenger shuttle, which exploded 73 seconds after liftoff and the Columbia shuttle which was torn up in the atmosphere during reentry? If there is a god, did god ignore those prayers? Worse, did god cause these disasters? Certainly if he is omniscient he had to know they were going to happen. Why didn't he prevent them? What lesson was he teaching by killing those brave, intelligent, highly skilled people? Is praying causing the accidents because god gets angry at people who try to tell him what to do? More realistically, has time wasted praying taken away from the serious engineering and hard thinking that is needed to prevent disasters? Why is praise being wasted on a non-existent god when it should be heaped in great mounds on the excellent engineering work, the dedicated management, the steady piloting and the clear foresight of NASA? Evidently (that is, based on the available evidence) there is no god and relying on petitions to a god is a terrible and incredibly risky way to run an engineering operation. reference: Wiki: space shuttle