He wasn't just saying 'do it like Apollo did' in terms of tech, but rather focusing on the process. I think the key takeaway is that one of the main things they did during Apollo was to obsessively try to get everybody to express their honest feedback, and especially negative feedback. Artemis isn't ever going anywhere for a million reasons, of which he listed a couple of random ones, but everybody keeps pretending it is.
That's because the powers that be surround themselves with yes-men or (equivalently) people are afraid of the consequences for stating their honest opinion, when that opinion is negative. It's a problem as old as time. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is based on tales dating back to around 1000AD, and I'm sure it goes back far further than that. This problem destroys competence, destroys countries, and has become ubiquitous in every single aspect of high level public (and to a lesser degree even high level private) decision making in the US.
Notice how things seem to constantly just go wrong in spite of effectively endless resources and manpower? If you look at what we have today in terms of any quantifiable metric we should be able to run circles around the 60s (in terms of, amongst other things, tech advancement) with our eyes shut, yet in practice we're struggling to recreate what they did in the 60s, in 7 years, starting from nothing and on a [relatively] extremely limited budget.
That's because the powers that be surround themselves with yes-men or (equivalently) people are afraid of the consequences for stating their honest opinion, when that opinion is negative. It's a problem as old as time. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is based on tales dating back to around 1000AD, and I'm sure it goes back far further than that. This problem destroys competence, destroys countries, and has become ubiquitous in every single aspect of high level public (and to a lesser degree even high level private) decision making in the US.
Notice how things seem to constantly just go wrong in spite of effectively endless resources and manpower? If you look at what we have today in terms of any quantifiable metric we should be able to run circles around the 60s (in terms of, amongst other things, tech advancement) with our eyes shut, yet in practice we're struggling to recreate what they did in the 60s, in 7 years, starting from nothing and on a [relatively] extremely limited budget.