I suspect that no human lives will be lost, simply because none of it will happen. Like you rightly say it is an insane pace - in fact a completely impossible pace.
Yes I know, Mercury 1 (a 15 minutes suborbital hop) in 1961 to Apollo 11 in 1969 - a few months over 8 years. But NASA enjoyed something like 4.5% of the entire US Federal budget at the time; it’s a tiny, tiny fraction of that now. And even then shortcuts were taken and lives were indeed lost.
The constant changing of priorities and missions just doesn’t help either; it just contributes to wasted money. No, it’s neigh-on impossible to imagine how any of the already shipped (and hopefully paid for) components for Gateway can possibly be re-purposed for a surface base - they are all going to be scrapped aren’t they?
Using Starship HLS, wasn’t a bad plan, it had enormous potential in terms of payload - assuming it could be made to work. And as always the Devil is in the detail. I suspect it can eventually be made to work and carry out the mission. But not in 4 years; 6-10 is more likely. Blue Origin’s lander is simpler, has less payload capacity but suffers from using cryogenic fuels, and storing them for any degree of time is not a solved problem, it may take a similar amount of time. By which time there will probably have been one or two Chinese crewed landings.
I think that NASA really needs to honestly evaluate what their medium to long term goals are? If the short term goal is just to get an American boot on the Moon during the current administration, then no, I think you’ve lost that one. Beat the Chinese, maybe, it’ll be tight, but they will basically be repeating Apollo?
NASA needs a Kennedy-type deadline and goal ‘before this decade is out to land a man and the Moon and return him successfully to Earth’; something which survives various Administrations.
After all who knows what President Newsom’s priorities will be in 2029?
