While writing the comment, I did think to myself, that NASA did a ton of prototypes to de-risk. They simulated the landing as close as they could possibly make it, on earth. So, probably not pure waterfall either. Maybe my comment was a bit too brusque in that regard.
Hehe. Well it's funny because years and years ago I made a similar comment to a person who I highly respected and had way more experience than me and he looked right at me and said, "No, waterfall does work." And it really made an impression on me.
But yeah, there's a point at which you have to ask where waterfall begins and agile ends in reality it's blurry. Prototyping is essentially in most nontrivial problems, so if you count prototyping as agile then shrug but ultimately it doesn't matter what we call it