Good ideas. Another possible approach could be to just add events where "failure" isn't a directly harmful thing. Right now, it feels like every event is a binary "something good happens/something bad happens" roll. Most games have "nothing happens" results on a lot of rolls. Failing a roll isn't always a critical fail where you get hurt. It's usually just that you don't achieve your goal. It's like your fire extinguisher example, but sometimes, you don't even need the extinguisher.
Imagine a "minor turbulence" weather effect. It's not going to make you crash, but your pilot rolls to see how bad it is:
-Failure: Landing costs 1 extra fuel.
-Success: Land with normal fuel cost.
This is a "negative" event, but you have no positive side. It's not "save fuel" on one side and "lose" on the other, which is how this game tends to work. And events could work the other way around too. Like when you're landing on a low gravity world. Make a piloting check:
-Success: Spend -1 fuel on the landing. It's easy to land on low gravity planets.
-Failure: The gravity isn't a problem, but the high winds cause you to still need to spend your fuel on maintaining the course.
Some events could be mitigated just by having the right crew member, too. Right now, there are "your crew member gets a normal Earth illness" events, and your roll is "you treat them and they get better" vs. "someone else gets sick too" which is fine, but what if that roll's possibilities changed based on whether you have a doctor or not? A doctor gives you "they get better" vs. "you have to isolate them but at least nobody else is sick" while no doctor means your best case is "you isolate them in time to avoid the rest of the crew coming down with their illness" and a failure spreads the damage to someone else.