We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive (8 NASA, 2 sister MIL programs), as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff.
People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time.
The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth.
And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability.
Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out.
Shameless plug, wrote a bit about the Apollo hagiography, Artemis and risk here – https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri...
Unless you happen to have some deep links into NASA, in which case please elucidate us all, then why not celebrate a happy and safe return from a sodding dangerous mission that involved things like >25,000 mph relative velocity and some remarkable navigation.
When you depart earth (close quarters gravity, air resistance, things in the way), everything moves really fast, really fast and any acceleration becomes an issue really ... fast!
The moon moves, the earth moves: both famously in some sort of weird dance around each other and both orbit around the sun. Obviously the moon affects the earth way less than vice versa but it still complicates things.
I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.
I have been excited for Artemis--yes it's big and expensive and late, but look how it has brought out the best of what humans can be--but, despite all that, the heat shield situation was textbook "normalization of deviance." Just as the O-rings were not designed to have any damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, just as there was not supposed to be any foam or tile damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, so too was the Artemis I heat shield not supposed to come back with damage, but they...
I'm not trying to be negative, and risks are inevitable, but the resemblance to me was uncanny. The lesson with normalization of deviance is that a successful result does not inherently mean a safe decision. After all, most of the time that you play Russian Roulette you will escape unharmed.
The heat shield failure was a test and the result was a working heat shield, when it counted. That's the point of tests. NASA already had several working heat shields from the old missions but the new one needed testing - for the shape of the craft etc. They already had a lot of data from the old efforts (that worked).
I think that exit and re-entry are almost routine now, provided your rocket doesn't explode. The tricky bit is out there in space and trying to make the moon a resource of some sort.
The mere fact that the outcome was successful does not inherently indicate that the decision-making was safe: the O-rings "worked" for 24 missions and the foam/tiles "worked" for 111. Nevertheless there were ample warnings and close calls.
Reentry from the Moon is not routine. Re-entry speed was about 40% faster than from low earth orbit, and kinetic energy goes up by the square, so about double.
As with any aerospace mishap, it's a chain of events, not just one cause.