>It doesn’t make any sense to spend that much money on something that’s still Russian roulette for the astronauts.

Sure it does.

We've got billions of humans to spend on getting humanity out of its gravity well. We can and will spare a few more.

Getting humanity out of our gravity well is the most important task this species faces, along with stabilizing our use of the resources in this one. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/astronomical-waste/

If you're not willing to spend a few lives on this problem you're not serious about the problem.

If you’re willing to spend a few lives, you can do that much cheaper than Artemis which aims to be perfectly safe but doesn’t actually succeed.

> aims to be perfectly safe

obviously that isn't true -- it aims to be relatively safe

...but in any case - it aims to bring humanity to the moon. That's the aim. Keep your eye on the prize.

from one of the artemis astronauts on livestream:

"It is very risky, and we are intimately [aware] of that risk"

ie It's not perfectly safe, and the astronauts are well aware of this fact.

astronaut #2

"do what scares you...that's why I'm [on artemis]"

clearly very risk-aware.

If you need expect perfection then we will never have a space mission.

Let the astronauts give informed consent. If they mission is to dangerous for NASA then we can only hope, ISRO, CNSA or ROSCOSMOS will go.

The point is that a $100B mission that’s still dangerous and only replicates 1960s achievements is completely pointless.

If they had set out to replicate the Moon landing at much lower cost and a controlled risk, that could have been different. Now they ended up with a very expensive, unsafe, and uninteresting mission - the worst possible combination.

So what's your point? Spend more on a project that is complete but not up to your standard?

Or Extend the mission to something novel? Some how without ballooning the project?

Neither is possible in the slightest.

For what it's worth the Apollo program adjusted for inflation is pushing 200bn USD compared to Artemis 100bn.

The Artemis programme is far safer than the Apollo program in terms of risk, Apollo sampled a much flatter high risk curve just 7 times.

Bottom line let the Astronauts decide what they consider safe enough they're very smart people and deserve to be allowed to give informed consent.