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From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?". Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels. Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at least cost savings where it matters. Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem. Yes, the plan might be to carry much more equipment in fewer launches, but if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If this amount of people are saying that something is lost in spirit and some stuff is not done in an optimal way, I tend to believe them. |
The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.
While arguably today there are comparable tensions, countries no longer have to prove anything to the world, and space exploration is mostly a scientific endeavour fueled by private companies that want to make a profit. There's less of an urgency to get to the moon, which can explain that difference in spirit that you mention.
FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go. The fact world superpowers achieved what they did in a couple of decades of the last century, a mere 60 years after flying machines were invented, is nothing short of extraordinary. But it was a special time, and we shouldn't feel pressured to repeat it.
> Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem.
That doesn't seem like a bad approach to me. There is a lot of value to be gained by gluing existing technology together, and if anything, Docker is proof of how wildly successful that can be. Most scientific breakthroughs are effectively a repurposing or combination of previous ideas, after all. I don't think this is a valid criticism of Docker, nor of this approach.