Acceptance of over costing and under delivering is exactly why the US is stuck with SpaceX as its prime space launch provider. It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop.
It's also this type of attitude that let's us be in a situation where we honestly don't know how well the heat shield will work on reentry (SLS launches are so expensive, and so slow to build and prep to launch, that we cannot fit in a uncrewed mission between 1 and 2 to test or validate fixes or models).
If Artemis as a program succeeds, it will be despite the incredible graft, pork, and ass covering, not because of it. I want Artemis to succeed because the achievement will be beautiful and amazing, and I want everyone to be safe and sound. I want Artemis to fail, to force a reckoning. I still believe that America has great things to offer to the world, but it's not going to be able to do that by muddling it's way through and cobbling together random pork filled programs into a vaguely inspiring shape.
New NASA administrator Isaacman has redone the Artemis program. The changes were announced at the Ignition event a few weeks ago:
https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/
If you read one thing, read the sides on building the moon base:
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2-building-t...
The goals it to fly often - adding a SLS launch to 2027 and a second launch to 2028. This drops the cost-per-launch, which is mostly fixed. It redoes SLS to make it less expensive and more capable. It moves the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon.
And it's budgeted at $10B/3 years, which fits into NASA's budget.
Isaacman took the Artemis program and fixed it. The reckoning came, and it's looking good.
If they’d wanted to they could have launched an empty Orion crew module into LEO on another, cheaper, rocket and tested re-entry. The crew module by itself is less than ten tonnes.
For the last 20 years NASA has intentionally run their Commercial Crew Program, which has the stated goal of developing/fostering/funding the development of commercial providers for launch vehicles.
They, by plan they explicitly laid out and implemented, decided to rely on American commercial providers. And that's what they got. And in doing so, the program ended up producing the most prolific/successful launch vehicle in history.
>> It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop
Yes, this is another company which the NASA commercial program explicitly funded in order to get them to develop another launch vehicle.