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.

This is a political deadline with no grounding in reality.

JFK proposed we go to the Moon in 1962. We did it in 1969, 7 years later.

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.

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.

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