[nabla9]

TL;DR:

- Apollo simple, Apollo success.

- Artemis very complex, many unknowns.

- Stated reasons for doing things are clearly not the real reasons.

- Providing honest negative feedback seems to be the the key to success.

- Artemis engineers might fear talking honestly.

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Personal comment: The timeline was fubar from the beginning. Remember when VP Mike Pence made a surprise announcement that NASA goes to the Moon 2024 surprising NASA director. Then NASA committed to it and scrambled to adjust everything.

[protastus]

Also:

- Apollo simple with many redundancies, design for failure, culture of risk management (after Apollo 1)

- Artemis very complex, many unknowns, unanswered questions, poor communication

[credit_guy]

I wonder if he mentioned the reason for Apollo: a muscle-flexing exercise to show the Soviet Union (and the rest of the world) who the boss is. Once the point was made, there was no need for further Moon or outer space exploration, and predictably the program ended.

We don't have that rationale now. Various presidents come with different ideas for space exploration, but the fundamental need is just not there, and without that, the budget and the focus is not there.

The only way for us to get back to the Moon is if we can do it on the cheap. So cheap that it doesn't cost a lot of political capital to do it. And for for that SpaceX seems like the best bet. Maybe not in 2 years, but at some point.