I think the main difference was political: for Apollo you had the most powerful nation in history throw their economic and political will into pushing a project forward.
replyNASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.
More frequent launches with less ambitious progress per launch makes good sense,
and follows the old-school approach used through Apollo to mitigate risk.
Having a lunar lander test in earth orbit,
for example,
is roughly the same mission as Apollo 9, is a good call.
Validating everything works together has been a sort of sore spot for the Artemis program.
replyAnd even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.
replyOrion doesn't seem operationally or financially capable of launching more than once a year. It's not that they don't want to do test flights, it's that they can barely do anything.
replyWhich goes back to the Pork-on-a-stick requirement that everything be about keeping the workers still employed.
replyYou meant cinematographers, right?
replyWell to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex
replyI’d say we’ll look back in a few decades and recognise the Apollo programs as the peak of the USA. Those people did truly amazing things. I recommend “Space Rocket History” podcast if you like Apollo. It’s a wonderful and highly detailed podcast and covers the US and Soviet space race in great detail.
replyIn a few decades we will look back and say now is peak (space) USA with SpaceX launching successfully, creating Starlink, Blue Origin finally reaching orbit, Rocket Lab reaching for Neutron, even ULA making BVlcan work.
replyto be fair they had way less requirements on making the CGI look good
replyback then TVs weren't that popular and those that had one were stuck with very low definition video, today our 2k and 4k screens would be able to spot their flaws easily