Low Earth Orbit Payload: Falcon Heavy: 140,000lb, Saturn V: 260,000lb
Launch cost: Falcon Heavy: ~$140M, Saturn V: $185M ($1B+ in 2016 dollars)
It blows my mind how crazy Saturn V was and it was 50 years ago.
Giving up the capabilities of the Saturn V hurt and cost every other project there after.
Look at the Space Station. It was way way more expensive because it had to be assembled in lots of flights.
The same goes for some of the deep space probs and space telescopes, they had to be designed often limited by small rockets.
Giving up the Saturn V was the biggest mistake the US Space program ever made. We are still working under that mistake and now have 3 groups trying to finally achieve something like it again, SLS, BFR, New Armstrong.
Space Shuttle came about because Saturn was not economically sustainable. NASA was getting those massive funds from the Gov for the Moon mission, and after the goal was achieved those funds stopped flowing, and NASA had no way to maintain those expensive rockets.
So NASA came up with a reusable spacecraft design, the Space Shuttle. But DoD wanted the shuttle to have a certain payload capacity/features for their use cases and that forced NASA to change their original design, which also made it a maintenance nightmare.
In hindsight, Space Shuttle would have achieved its mission of being a cheap reusable spacecraft, if NASA were able to use its original design.
> In hindsight, Space Shuttle would have achieved its mission of being a cheap reusable spacecraft, if NASA were able to use its original design.
There are lots of ifs and buts and I blaming everything on the DoD and not make NASA responsable for anything is false narrative. NASA made a lot of mistakes to even get to that point.
The goal of Space Shuttle was to reduce the cost of space flight.
Also it's 140000 lbs, or 63800kg.