I’m sure there’s more to the story, but half a billion dollars seems like a staggeringly expensive price tag for one piece of a moon mission. What does all that money go to? What’s the ROI?

We’ve been sending rovers to other planets for decades, so I assume there’s a good base of knowledge to build on. This isn’t basic research level, it seems like it should be a lot closer to production work. Satellites go up nearly every day, so I’d guess the space-spec supply chain is healthy.

Do post-mortem documents get published on programs like this? I really can’t understand it.