I said easy. Not well understood. I can fly planes. It’s hard, and has limited room for fucking up. (It’s also hyperbole to suggest we understand lift. We don’t.)
Piloting a boat is easier and more forgiving. Hence, splashdown. You don’t need direction. You don’t need lift. Parachute physics is a backbreaker, but it’s symmetrical. Same for splash.
At no point were the astronauts piloting a boat. The reasons they splash down into the ocean has nothing to do with buoyancy being easier to solve, and even less to do with the ease of piloting a boat.
>It’s also hyperbole to suggest we understand lift. We don’t.
Maybe you personally do not understand lift, but "we" do in fact understand it. Please educate yourself before continuing this discussion any further.
I'm also a pilot (CFI). My day job is space operations. And I can tell you've had too many hangar arguments about how wings work.
Pilots don't understand lift. Aero engineers understand it just fine.
That's a snappy one-liner but it doesn't address the real concerns.
First of all, subsonic lift is well understood and has been for decades. The answer is much more mundane: The Artemis mission profile does not require payload doors that open, no Canadarm, no requirement to service, launch, and/or capture satellites in orbit, and so like good engineers they designed the minimum vehicle that satisfies the requirements.
Also, the Shuttle was actually much more expensive to reuse than originally predicted.