The more I've thought about that lecture the less I really agree with most of the things he raised, for the simple reason that Apollo is never, ever going to ha

The more I've thought about that lecture the less I really agree with most of the things he raised, for the simple reason that Apollo is never, ever going to happen again. It's a lot of argument from increduality (e.g. it's easy to pretend starship launch's are "too many", without addressing that practical reusability has been a thing for years right now). At it's peak, the Apollo project was funded to the tune of 1.1% total US federal outlays during the time period it ran. That's an enormous amount of money, which failed to produce a remotely sustainable result. You got what you got: moon landings done quick, and then never again. The modern Apollo project is SLS which...is a big, expensive, absolutely cannot fail rocket (which is really a jobs program for preferred contractor districts, with technology choices decided by politicians not engineers). Basically the SED lecture spends a lot of time gesturing at Apollo, but never addresses the actual problem which is NASA is funded the way it's funded: of course they know they're going to miss their launch dates, they're not funded to hit them, and they're probably going to wind up redesigning the mission once Starship is flying to orbit and actual performance numbers are realized off-paper. The SLS is the SLS for the same reason: at the time the program started there was no SpaceX, nor Space Shuttle and it was something of a national embarrassment the US didn't have a manned space capability but the Russians still did. In short, for a lecture which opens talking about people worrying about disagreeing with their superiors, he stays well away from the actual live-wires of the issues.