Just about every time kirk lofts himself into space, he manages to lose some crew members.
We are of course totally impressed with all the cool and wonderful things he does, and how he gets himself out of the craziest near death situations, but if you think about it for a minute, he may be a bad bet overall.
Every time he survives one of his misshapen plans, he loses a few crew members. We are of course happy that most of them survive, but let us not forget to count the actual numbers.
If kirk keeps living he will go on to go on (ha ha) another mission where he will lop a few more off the headcount.
If he had simply completely failed miserably, blown up his ship and everybody in it including himself the first time he went out, surely this would be a horrible loss of starfleet membership. But it would end there, it wouldn’t go on forever and ever like it has been.
We’ve got to be up to like 10 kirk movies by now. That’s a lot of dead crew that might have been saved.