people in the age range 20–70 in 01970 would be in the age range 74–124 today. different people, who identify with those people, in several different countries, would like to do what those people did. it behooves them to study what those people did and how they did it, not because they can't do anything better, but because it's easy to do worse, and both of these criticisms make a good case that artemis is doing much worse. the ussr at the same time did so much worse that they never landed humans on the moon at all. similarly with contemporary france, the uk, the prc, etc.
you cannot get to the moon and back on a saturn v because there aren't any saturn v rockets in operable condition, and there never will be again. it belongs to history now, like children's chemistry sets that could make rocket fuel, being able to order rocket fuel ingredients without getting a visit from a police agency, drugs being legal by default instead of illegal, new classes of antibiotics being brought to market, and being able to go out in public without your movements being permanently archived for spy agencies to data-mine later on
artemis is on track to follow in the footsteps not of apollo but of the soviet n1/l3 program, which was canceled after losing the race decisively to apollo. it's chang'e that's following in the footsteps of apollo. we'll see if spacex can change that, but i'm not that optimistic
You raise the point, that particularly when it comes to manufacturing, living knowledge is paramount -
Could we have restarted Saturn V production in 1975? yes, at some vast cost to remake tooling.
What about 1985? oof, that's a little harder, how many of the people alive know how to make a Rocketdyne F-1, but probably still doable, at some yet greater cost.
What about 1995? maybe still possible - lots of the base industries we relied on to make it have ceased to exist, and the production knowledge for base components have changed so much that you're almost gonna start over. Some knowledge on how to build it is still alive, it's only 30 years later.
What about 2005? almost impossible, you'd have to recreate whole kinds of technologies from scratch - the tech trees have evolved so much, almost all of the first hand knowledge is dead, or very near to dead. It'd probably be easier to start over, with a clean sheet.
This is why the US Army still buys some number of tanks every year - so the production line stays open and we dont lose the knowledge. We're running into issues restarting some missile production (which is being used in Ukraine because of similar issues).
I do think in the end Artemis will likely be a success, but at a vast cost - but dont forget how expensive Apollo was. It too was vastly expensive.
people in the age range 20–70 in 01970 would be in the age range 74–124 today. different people, who identify with those people, in several different countries, would like to do what those people did. it behooves them to study what those people did and how they did it, not because they can't do anything better, but because it's easy to do worse, and both of these criticisms make a good case that artemis is doing much worse. the ussr at the same time did so much worse that they never landed humans on the moon at all. similarly with contemporary france, the uk, the prc, etc.
you cannot get to the moon and back on a saturn v because there aren't any saturn v rockets in operable condition, and there never will be again. it belongs to history now, like children's chemistry sets that could make rocket fuel, being able to order rocket fuel ingredients without getting a visit from a police agency, drugs being legal by default instead of illegal, new classes of antibiotics being brought to market, and being able to go out in public without your movements being permanently archived for spy agencies to data-mine later on
artemis is on track to follow in the footsteps not of apollo but of the soviet n1/l3 program, which was canceled after losing the race decisively to apollo. it's chang'e that's following in the footsteps of apollo. we'll see if spacex can change that, but i'm not that optimistic