[SloppyDrive]

Im not really convinced SLS and Artemis are best effort projects; we improve through refinement, and the only way to get there is cadence. More launches with the same general mission requirements.

One launch a year is not even close to what we can manage with our current technology, to the point where the scope is too small to be legitimately worth doing.

Its not solely a matter of energy; its about opportunity for learning. The current scale is too small to be worth doing at all.

If it was a program of something like >50 payloads over a decade, that gives enough opportunity for refinement, in cost, safety, and scale manufacture methods to actually see something new.

[ETH_start]

The value of a mission like this isn't only in the narrow technical data it returns. Its value is also institutional. Once you have an actual crewed mission orbiting the Moon, the program becomes concrete rather than aspirational. That creates momentum inside NASA and among contractors, strengthens the credibility of follow-on lunar missions, and accelerates work on the many parallel systems a sustained lunar program actually requires.

I agree entirely that it's much easier to imagine a successful moon program built around repeatable missions at high cadence, so I'm not disagreeing on that point. I would just push back on the idea that this has little or no value.

[SloppyDrive]

This is exactly what I mean though; the technical decisions for the SLS, and every bit of "institution" that follow are so flawed that I dont believe you can draw a path from this to future work.

It doesnt matter if you are actually running missions, if the scale is so small and wasteful that its not meaningfully comparable to the aspirational future missions.