Comment by ErroneousBosh

> The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.

I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk.

The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer.

The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987.

I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee.

The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.