Destin 'learns' NASA

Destin is an aerospace engineer who educates people about engineering in a very entertaining way through his website, Smarter Every Day, and associated YouTube channel. The guy truly makes learning fun for everyone with his unique and passionate approach to all sorts of weird and wild engineering problems and solutions.

Destin is certainly no dummy, but until this recent video where he addresses what are apparently some very high-level people in NASA's Artemis program, i hadn't realized just how smart he is or how well connected to NASA he is. He titled the video 'I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway)' which sounded like click-bait to me, however after listening to this interesting talk, i can understand why he chose such a title.

Despite his modesty, Destin is quite skilled at communicating his points in a most elegant way. During his talk he risks his relationship with NASA by strongly criticizing some of the top-tier people in the Artemis program regarding what he recognizes as very serious flaws in the mission to return to the Moon and, eventually, to fly from there to Mars. Although he doesn't state so directly, for obvious reasons, Destin seems to think that the Artemis program is in jeopardy if it is allowed to continue on its current path and one of the several reasons which he implies is interesting. He very delicately suggests that a key problem is a difference in culture between this politically correct, 'woke', gender-bending idiocy which is being forced upon society today, and the the culture of the 60s where he posits that NASA engineers placed a higher priority on speaking up and taking risks in order to solve crucial problems rather than remaining silent because somebody's precious 'fee-fees' might be hurt.

The world witnessed the many catastrophic failures of the Soviets due, in part, to communism. What many people fail to realize, including those at NASA, is that communism is returning to the West, though in a much subtler way and under a different brand name. NASA has settled upon a massively complex and ambitious program that Destin feels deviates drastically from the simplicity, logic and redundancy of Apollo. He feels that valuable knowledge acquired during Apollo is being ignored by the Artemis program and that unnecessary complexity has been added, and that the repercussions could be severe. It will be interesting to see how the current culture at NASA affects the Artemis program.