YMMV / The Cold Equations

• Accidental Aesop: Don't build a ship — or anything important — that close to the wire if you want it to end well. Also always, always do a basic pre-start check, especially for something important.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Besides the moral about margin for error mentioned above, some readers see a warning against blaming the cruelty of the universe for problems actually caused by the unwillingness of human beings to improve things or abnegating responsibility for basic human error.
• Ass Pull: The lengths this story takes to doom the girl get so outrageous that it sounds like a deliberate death trap. Given how Campbell refused to publish the work until Godwin created an ending where the girl can't be saved, even after he made several revisions where he removed something that could be done but then create another way to explain how he could save her, one could say that in trying to avert the sort of Ass Pull common to Science Hero stories of the time, Campbell wound up enforcing an equal (if not worse) and opposite Ass Pull.
• Common Knowledge: Some critics go so far as to say that there's no reason for the lack of failsafes, such as only barely having enough fuel to reach the destination. While some of the design flaws (the excessively large interior) and negligence (the stowaway casually walks on board) are difficult to justify, the story does give a reason for the lack of fuel: it's a frontier ship and resources are scarce. The fragile margins of error are explained at length in the story's opening.
• Values Dissonance: The story was written as a response to the Invincible Science Heroes common in literature at the time, who would Ass Pull an answer out of SCIENCE! to save everyone. This archetype has long since died (other than things like The Martian where the science is fairly well researched & explained and even then plenty of things go wrong), so most discussion surrounding the story focuses on the ridiculous contrivances necessary to create the situation in the first place, such as the incredibly short-sighted design of the spaceship, the fact that we are told every piece of it is absolutely essential and indispensable but it contains many features which are not, and the extremely inadequate security protecting it. Nowadays most people remark of just how poorly engineered the ship would be that there was such a slim margin for error on the ship, when real spaceships are overengineered with multiple redundant systems. Whereas the story was first published years before the first orbital launch, so the author and editor could be forgiven for not thinking of that at the time.

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