Ask from @alpaca-dave that I for some reason can't directly respond to:
Hi! You’re my go-to for this sort of matter; Any thoughts on the latest Artemis delays? Just normal for doing hard science, or problems due to how this is being managed? (…as opposed to it being a conspiracy to cover up “ancient moon structures”)
Oh, boy, Artemis delays are... well, I remember when it was going to be a maiden flight in 2017 and a crewed return to the Moon in 2020. The thing is that using Space Shuttle heritage hardware - like the big old ex-Thiokol solid rocket boosters - in a new launch vehicle is something that seems like a perfectly sensible decision on the face of it, but in practice is tantamount to an ancient curse. Before SLS, the big Artemis rocket that will soon send humans round the Moon, there were the boosters of the Constellation program, Ares I and Ares V - and before the Ares series was the National Launch System of the 1990s.
All of these rockets took on the same basic design - a central hydrogen-burning stage with varying degrees of Space Shuttle external tank, thrust structure, and main engine heritage, flanked by two boosters from the same SRB plant that cranked Shuttle's out, plus or minus a barrel segment or two. The story of why none of these things ever flew is the stuff of several congressional reports(1). But the long and short of it for the Constellation program is that it had gone through several extremely costly design revisions, and was staring down the barrel of some pretty fundamental design flaws - overheating core engines, abort modes that would inadvertently blowtorch the capsule, etc. So in the late 2000s, a decision was made - that the whole thing was just not working out, to the point that we needed to start from a clean slate. The fresh start was to hew closer to using Shuttle systems than Ares did - no wider tanks, no new core engines, cheap and easy.
Well, in theory.
In practice, taking the parts of Shuttle and making them into an inline launcher turned out to be about as monumental a task as the more ambitious Ares, plagued with issue after issue. Now, there were designs(2) that were basically the bog standard Shuttle stack with the Orbiter spaceplane replaced with an expendable cargo fairing and, possibly, a crew capsule with an eject motor. Would that counterfactual have taken us back to the Moon cheaper and faster? Well, who can say - it certainly seems like it could have been less work, but maybe it'd have been a quagmire too. In our timeline, though, SLS being continuously delayed has been the case for so long that it actually feels stranger that it's happening Real Soon Now than that it's been nudged down the road just a little a bit more. It's Zeno's Paradox for rockets - the launch date gets ever closer, seeming to never actually arrive. Touch wood though, the finish line really does seem to be approaching at last!
So, long story short! No secret moon structures, just legacy hardware from a flawed program(3) taking its final revenge.
(1) see the Final Report of the Augustine Committee. Various paths forward were addressed - I sometimes wonder how the 'uprated commercial launchers and distributed lift' pathway might have turned out, but it was broadly never on the table really - politically it was a nonstarter to lay off the factories that had turned out Shuttle ETs and SRBs for decades.
(2) see the ~2009 Shuttle Derived Heavy Lift Vehicle, and its 1980s ancestor Shuttle-C
(3) The Shuttle was a beautiful bird with a laundry list of achievements to its name, but undeniably a deeply compromised design - as the poor crews of Challenger and Columbia learned so tragically. Shocking little fact: its maiden flight had a one in twelve chance of being lost with all crew!
