You can have an apollo style mission, or a strong ecosystem / competition that serves a wide range of consumers, but you can't have both from the same source.

This isn't a consumer mission though. All for competition when it makes sense, but you also risk diluting your limited budget and quality control at the cost of the project's success.

While that makes sense if you are only considering the single target of landing someone on the Moon, 1960s style, in this case it's about building a sustainable industry. The moon landing is just an excuse, and a target, something to be excited about. The real "mission" is build a bigger space industry, mostly because that creates jobs and pays contracts, but also because it pushes science and technology forward.

Just have a 2nd Apollo rocket on stand by. After Columbia, this is what NASA did with shuttle launches. There's the famous images of two shuttles on the launch pad at the same time.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/multimedia/images/08-09...

Sure, multiple vendors sounds like a nice idea, but rarely in real life does the 2nd vendor's product just act as a drop-in replacement. You might have 2 launch platforms with SpaceX and Blue Origin, but the payload meant for one will not just be able to be launched from the other. If you want that, then NASA needs to design the plans (or pick one set of plans) and then have multiple contractors building the agreed upon thing

Let me rephrase that: You can treat this as a sequential series of US Government specified projects, or you can attempt to bootstrap an economy around the problem and see if great things flourish.

Their doing option 2, I think, and I agree with that.

The Apollo program had failures with humans. People died. Failures happened, and many smaller failures happened even during the successful launch to the moon.

The Apollo 13 crew might have preferred to have a backup sent rather than piecing together a working craft from scraps.