Human kindness and concern can be the highest and most effective of motivators.
But it ain't without its drawbacks too. A cold, hard rationality can many times save more lifes than "humanizations".
One example is in sanitation engineering. That is a form of engineering that has saved and improved innumerable lifes. Yet, for the most part picturing the human aspect of it *isn't* quite helpful or edifying. Being a cold hard, "sterile" engineer, biologist or chemist can be more helpful in that field.
For another eaxmple, here, stat case. The term "super hero" is itself dehumanizing. It says many things, surely. Among them that the people are somehow different than us, beyond us, immune from the normal mortal logic of death, of the normal pedestrian regard for safety, we'd have in mind were we building a shuttle to take the nieghborhood mah jhongg group up in.
Another aspect of "humanization", is that what we project on others to do, is not always so "merciful", or safe. A number of posters have compared the Shuttle safety to NASCAR racing. That's not fair. In a way, any NASCAR race pushes to the danger side of scale because it is a fierce competition -- the cars, tires and engines equalized to the most piddling aspect, the winning driver is thereby forced to push the envelop of safety. The Shuttle, however, we want to push to the more and more safety with every mission. Even then, in NASCAR, remarkable efforts have been made in improving driver safety -- wreck the car, preserve the driver.
If only the Shuttle program clearly demonstarted a similar vector towards crew safety.