Like Operation Epstein Fubar, it's all distraction-theatre.
"See how GREAT we are??" "accomplishment", while gutting the government & bombing hospitals & universities, for sake of getting the Epstein files off of the criminals named in them.
( & getting the heat off of the "DOJ" which admitted to shredding some of them, holding-back 47k of them, etc )
( & getting the heat off the ICE quota-based-deportations regime )
etc.
Artemis is an immense waste of money.
Worse, it's got a fundamental design-flaw which means if any of its 4 main-engines "anomaly" during takeoff, then the mission's at-least destroyed, possibly killed.
Notice that with SpaceX's rockets, you can have an engine-anomaly & it'll just make the launch more-difficult?
There are sooo many engines, that each-engine's % of the work is small-enough, that the rest can carry it, if 1 fails.
With Artemis?
ANY engine which fails, & the mission's DEAD.
They engineered it to be incapable of dealing-with such statistically-inevitable failures.
That's irresponsible, in my eyes.
Falcon9 & Starship both have loads of engines, & can deal with 1-failure, properly.
Why go against sane engineering-principles?
Because the point of the thing is institutional validation, not optimal use-of-resources.
As Feynman grated against, last century, it's simply the wrong culture that's running the show.
Business-culture instead of engineering-culture, was what killed people in the shuttlecraft..
Artemis is produced by institutionality-instead-of-right-engineering, from what I can see.. & NASA's having about 1/4 of its budget gutted immediately, so .. Artemis gets funded, but NASA's real missions get discarded?
Theatre, not NASA work.
< shrug >
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