Mr. Issacman likes to say, "We're following the Apollo Playbook." If you are GENUINELY doing that, you'd have two fully working landers. We don't. I would have saved this flight until we had at least one fully functional lander, so we could REALLY test the darn thing, as we did on Apollo 9.
Gene J. Mikulka
The entire pitch for the descoped Artemis III was to de-risk the lunar landers in LEO.
The fact that the primary HLS provider for Artemis IV, SpaceX's Starship HLS, isn't even sending up an actual prototype of its lunar lander is pretty damning if you ask me.
