Engineering is done in the context of constraints, cost is one constraint - and its a relatively conserved constraint. Saving labor in one area allows for more care in other areas. Especially given that labor is often not cost constrained, but skill constrained, which is less elastic.

You would be the first person to ever accuse the Orion program of cutting costs.

There's different kinds of costs: cost to the government, and cost to actually build the thing.

The contractor has no trouble inflating the first one whenever they can, but they want to strip the second one to the bone to maximize profits.

More precise would be:

NASA is an organization that is dysfunctional and way too expensive for what it does. It then decided to use agressive cost cutting to cover up these problems.

The fix for not doing that by hand is to get a robot to do it, given the applicator is human-held, a human-strength Kuka with enough reach to cover the area it can handle before the applicator needs refurbishment of some sort which would give a good opportunity to move the robot to a new section of the heat shield.

For the Apollo spacecrafts:

> The paste-like material was gunned into each of the 330,000 cells of the fiberglass honeycomb individually, a process taking about six months. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT#Apollo_Command_Module

Labor intensive methods aren't automatically better: you have more manual steps which must be done perfectly and validated etc.

Thats what engineering is. If you dont have to consider cost or labor, a lot of engineering becomes much easier.

Apollo was ridiculously expensive. it was a proof of concept, but not sustainable for long term exploration

How expensive in comparison to the nuclear submarines or nuclear carriers?

The Apollo program cost about as much as 22 Gerald Ford class nuclear carriers.

Amortized over the whole program, each launch cost the same as building 2 Gerald Ford class nuclear carriers, or $26 billion USD.

> How expensive in comparison to the nuclear submarines or nuclear carriers?

SLS already costs about as much as a nuclear submarine. Per launch.

About 4% of the federal budget and 6% of discretionary spending at its peak, not of GDP.

Still a very high number, but nowhere near the military-budget-levels you're talking about.