Fifty-six years ago, President John F. Kennedy went to Rice University in Houston and proclaimed, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Fast forward to 2018, and it seems that NASA is taking that line too much to heart. The space agency wants to return to the moon the hard way, and the plan does not sit well with a number of outside experts.