>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.
Well, money wise they now spend much more budget (inflation adjusted) it seems. Technology wise, one would expect they have more of it now, than back then. So, what, they lack some mystery motivation factor?
I'd say it's rather general modern bureucratic incompetence, overdesign, plus losing the people who knew how to build stuff and had actual Apollo-era experience, with a huge period in between without Moon missions that meant they couldn't pass anything directly to the current NASA generation (a 40 year old NASA engineer today would be negative years old back then), which obliterated all kinds of tacit knowledge.
It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.
>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.
Isn't the whole point that they're not "taking time to do it right", but waste enormous amounts of money and time while doing it massively wrong?
Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget.
And Apollo program itself was, IIRC, over half of it.
Never since NASA had such funding and political will to just let them try to get a stated goal. History of projects since Apollo is full of every attempt at making things simpler and more reusable either getting canceled, blown with congressional requirements for pork-barrel (SLS), damaged by needing to beg for money from organizations with different goals (Shuttle is a great example), smothered by budget cuts resulting in reuse plans getting canceled skyrocketing per-mission cost (Shuttle, Cassini), and that with NASA being effectively prevented from doing iterative approach and ending having to gold-plate everything to reduce risks on the often "once in a lifetime" launch.
It's important to remember that Apollo was one of Kennedy's signature political projects at the time he was assassinated, which was an important factor in its political viability.
>Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget
Given the figures in TFA, that points to a much smaller federal budget and much smaller government expenditures in general, than to less absolute (inflation adjusted) money for this over Apollo.
>It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.
Does it mean Artemis is the Electron of space missions?
Well, money wise they now spend much more budget (inflation adjusted) it seems. Technology wise, one would expect they have more of it now, than back then. So, what, they lack some mystery motivation factor?
I'd say it's rather general modern bureucratic incompetence, overdesign, plus losing the people who knew how to build stuff and had actual Apollo-era experience, with a huge period in between without Moon missions that meant they couldn't pass anything directly to the current NASA generation (a 40 year old NASA engineer today would be negative years old back then), which obliterated all kinds of tacit knowledge.
It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.
>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.
Isn't the whole point that they're not "taking time to do it right", but waste enormous amounts of money and time while doing it massively wrong?