The mission plan used for Apollo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit_rendezvous

has a bit of the character of a stunt, like going over Niagara falls in a barrel, but it is much easier than all the alternative plans. If you were a science fiction fan growing up in the 1980s you might have read editorials in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that suggested we were sold an inferior plan to get to the moon but anything better is a lot more difficult. Whether it is the star-crossed SLS-Orion complex, the comically bloated and tippy Starship-derived lander [1] or the plan to meet those up in a parking orbit and have astronaut climb out one hatch and into the other, there's no realistic plan at all.

[1] if you had a pair of those chopsticks and methane-oxygen fuel from ISRU boy it would be sweet but without that...

The space shuttle was an interesting thing but ultimately was a patchwork of politically motivated parts that in hindsight wasn't that successful of a space program. Artemis having to build on some of this just carried forward the same problems.

What makes me sad about this is that roughly 50% of the population was not alive the last time people stepped on the moon. I count myself among those I missed it by one year. Although I would not have remembered it at the time. Even at the time of the shuttle NASA should have been working to test interesting and non-financially viable technologies to release into the commercial market. Now launching rockets into space is fully a commercial endeavor. I think there's still a great role for NASA. Because there are some plausible technologies that will never be financially viable to research and develop without them. Let NASA partner with some of these places but develop things like aerospike engines and other technologies that have promise but are too far away from a commercial realization to be viable at this point.

I want to see people go to the moon again. Artemis was a big waste of money but I wanted it to send people back to the moon even if it was just to remind people that as a nation and as a world we should aspire to great and impossible things. That we should look up instead of looking down and inward all of the time. I wanted Artemis to prove out some of these technologies and then on the next trip it can go on a a SpaceX rocket or someone else's.

Its pretty clear China will do it and on schedule.

He was a great enough President that the momentum did not stop even long after he had been killed.

Kennedy was very widely loved around the world, except of course by the communist dictator type.

But Nixon hated him without a doubt. It took a hell of a deceptive machine to get Nixon elected and it took years after losing to Kennedy the first time. Machine kept on going brrr.

By about 1972 it was plain to see that very few Americans were going to be able to afford anything which was the least bit costly or expensive for the foreseeable future.

And getting fewer. Nixon's inflation was just beginning to build steam and his full-blown recession was just around the corner.

Individuals, businesses, institutions, everyone except the most fortunate could do nothing but cut back, and too often that was not enough.

With that other type of Presidential initiative, the malfeasance kind, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. That's what I mean by the foreseeable future.

To a lot of us it was pretty much accepted that maybe it would take until the 21st century, which was just as far in the future as WWII was in the past. There were no signs positive enough for anything else. All you could do is use your imagination and hope that nobody crooked got to be in power like that again, plus pray nobody else would take a chance on dropping the ball either.

But 2026 ? You've got to be kidding, nobody thought it would take this long, surely Americans would be so advanced by this time that nobody would ever accept such dishonest, imitation leadership ever again.

But here we are.

Anybody who had a moonshot in mind a couple years ago has to be whole lot more realistic now, the dollar as a currency is just not valuable enough any more to cope with the engineering requirements in anything like a timely way by comparison.

As another poster mentioned, the Chinese may be who does it this time.

If nothing else their leadership may be deeply corrupt, but it would be worse if they were actively trying to destroy their own currency at the same time.