NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Not only that, he wanted to go to the moon before the end of the decade. They made it within that time.

Which is kind of the key point - Kennedy's deadline was a realistic one based on the technical difficulty of the challenge.

Artemis is scheduled to take longer than Apollo.

We are in year 8 of Artemis. In year 8 of Apollo there were multiple manned missions including one that went to the moon but did not land.

It was never realistic. It turned out be possible, though.

Also, corners were cut in the testing. (Full stack testing.)

I don't know how you can claim a deadline that was achieved was not realistic.

Full stack testing was not cutting corners. After ground testing it was deemed that incremental testing would not be beneficial. Doing tasks in parallel instead of in series can introduce project risks, but that's not the same thing as cutting corners, which is where something necessary is not done at all.

It's not realistic that you can become a supermodel. But it's not impossible.

The idea that rocket X not exploding in a single launch makes it man-rated is cutting corners.

I am not a supermodel, I don't have the looks for it. But for everyone who has become a supermodel, it was most certainly realistic that they could become supermodels. If you have what it takes to accomplish a task, accomplishing the task is realistic. That's what the term realistic means.

Full stack testing was testing the entire rocket at the same time instead of using dummy stages to test parts of the rocket separately. There was opposition to it because if the rocket failed it might be difficult to diagnose why exactly it failed, which would slow the project down in the long run. Based on the ground testing and advances in instrumentation, the risk of a project delay from a failure was considered acceptable. It still took multiple launches to man rate the rockets. There's a reason the first manned launch of the Saturn V was Apollo 8.

> who has become

After the fact, it always looks inevitable.

Would you have gone up on that first manned Saturn launch? Not me. Recall how the space shuttle was safe, until it blew up. And then it was safe again, and broke up on reentry.

"Winning the Powerball is totally realistic. Always knew I had it in me."

The parent is correct. JFK famously didn't consult with engineers when picking the timeline. It was just lucky that it all worked out.

And before the fact it looked realistic.

Everyone on the first manned Saturn test died. Do you know why people got into the second manned test? It was not that they knew with certainty it would be safe, but because they thought it was realistic that they could accomplish their goal.

People die in car accidents every day, that does not make my plan to drive to work tomorrow unrealistic.

Spend $257 billion dollars on powerball tickets and yeah, winning the powerball is quite realistic. Indeed you have better than a 95% chance of winning at least 300 times.

No, JFK consulted extensively with the engineers beforehand. The end of the decade timeframe first came from a NASA study published February 7, 1961. Kennedy's budget had actually rejected the initial proposal from Webb to fund the moon program for an end of the decade moon mission just a few weeks prior to Gagarin's flight. A new proposal was put together and presented May 8, 1961 for Johnson by James Webb, Abe Hyatt, and Robert Seaman which pushed for a moon landing by end of decade. Von Braun was even more aggressive, telling Kennedy that it could be done by 1968.