They know darn well that we're simply not ready to sail into deep space. Radiation shielding, orbital manufacturing, computer autonomy, peaceful nuclear use, etc. Lots of needed hypothetical technologies, or requisite trust and social stability that allows for the use of those technologies are missing. They couldn't even get to work on it in some of domains.

We in the public all knew about that wall by the 1980s: the anime Mobile Suit Gundam(1979) literally begins with a space habitat declaring independence and creating a Bay of Sydney in Australia by gassing and throwing down a resisting habitat with a reverse swing-by at the back of the Moon. It's all overblown plot for a work of fiction, but also something everyone knows will happen eventually that no one has response strategies for.

So as the immediate "path forward", NASA put up a boathouse next to a small lake near the ocean under the pretense that long-term researches of effects of lakewater on human body are to be conducted, using surplus Russian cargo ships. We know what happens if we did row into the ocean with the boats we have or can launch from Earth, we die from radiation. They're not conducting researches, they're just trying to keep the boat makers alive until we sort out the trust problem needed to work on the work to follow.

Not a lot had changed on that front in the past few decades, other than that the aforementioned weak trust had started collapsing very recently. No way the world is going to trust the US with NERVAs and Lunar shipyards under the current circumstance.