NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator.

A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.

Having a deadline is how things get done. With no deadline, nothing gets accomplished.

Deadlines, political pressure to ignore issues and get it done, is how you get astronauts dead. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. And of course Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 / Salyut 1; it's not just a problem for America.

I fear it's going to happen again; Orion isn't safe and hasn't been successfully tested. The heat shield started to disintegrate the last time they tested it and instead of testing it again with their changes they're going to put people in it next time.

To play devil's advocate, the only purpose astronauts serve is PR. Anything that can be done is space could be done cheaper and better with automation/rovers. So it seems that having those astronauts risk their lives for a short term political win is just table stakes, because the alternative for them is to stay on Earth and maybe pay $100K for just an hour in orbit with any of the commercial space tourism companies.

Automation still cannot pick a strawberry.