It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.
Everything about SLS, and most of Artemis, has been dictated by Congress, often overriding expert advice.
Why not just give NASA the money and let them get on with it?
The same happens with the US military, Congress constantly deleting funding for programs they don't like to fund ones they do.
The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
We tend to look at pork as unambiguously bad because it's wasteful or often has more than a whiff of corruption, but the picture for political scientists is more mixed.
Turns out it's easier to bargain with legislators when policy can give them a win in their districts or states. It greases the wheels for negotiation or provides levers to flip opposition party members. Legislatures often become more sclerotic and dysfunctional after reforms to pork barrel spending.
I don't want to call pork good, but there are real trade-offs to pork-free government that we haven't figured out how to solve any other way
The first question for me is always is this a thing worth doing - which has an aspect of price involved, but isn't the definitive answer.
In the 60s we weren't going to land in the darkness because we couldn't see to land.
But the shadows are probably where the water might be, and that's where we're going next!
Artemis feels a bit more "Beat the Chinese, and show the world we still got it." I think cost-effectiveness[1] is a fig-leaf for what are SpaceX fanboys: had the same mission been on a Starship, HN would be awash with how other companies (Blue Origin) were late to earth-orbit, and the gap had widened beyond Earth's orbit.
1. In contrast, I haven't seen any complaints about Military-Industrial pork on any of the Iran threads, even when contrasting the cost of interceptors vs drones. Let slone have pork dominate the thread.
How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.
also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.
So to call the entire thing “political” ignores the purpose of those involved and critical to the outcome at the expense of just labeling it all “political”.
I had a great Prof during my bachelor from Russia - this is what he always told -> and it makes sense: Back then was cold war