The first Moon landing took less than a decade. Why is NASA going so slowly?
It’s the old saying of “Cheap, fast, good. You can have any two.” Project Apollo had to be fast, and the work had to be very, very good in order to be safe and successful. Fortunately, Apollo had a very high budget (nearly 5% of Federal spending at the time), so it was able to accomplish incredible things on a compressed schedule. NASA knew that things were very different when Constellation was proposed. The work still has to be very, very good, but budgets today are far more constrained. NASA is now only about 0.5% of Federal budget. As a result, the program will to take longer than the first time around. But this is the responsible thing to do, and it helps insure the safety of our astronauts.
