Tietel is not very happy about the Artemis program. She describes it as a boondoggle to support various aerospace companies to the benefit of various politicians. She calls it expensive, delayed, old tech, etc.
I've been calling SLS a jobs program pretty much from the beginning. It was clearly intended to keep dollars flowing to certain districts; actually launching stuff into orbit was not its primary purpose.
The other problem Amy points out is that Artemis is being fast-tracked like Apollo, but it doesn't enjoy anwhere
near the level of support in Congress or the public eye to do so effectively. And it's coming at the expense of some
really useful and important work that NASA used to do but is now derided as "woke"
1 - Earth science (including climate science), promotion of STEM teaching to minority populations, etc. Stuff that has far more impact than manned spaceflight. And there's no funding beyond Artemis III.
It's just all show and no substance, while being a
very expensive show.
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1. Literally - the line item slashing STEM outreach describes it as "woke".
