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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure I would class either of Gmail or Facebook with the Apollo Program in terms of headcount (est. 400k), total cost (estimates from $100-200 Bn), complexity (hundreds of contractors, millions of moving parts, dozens of directly-operated sites, thousands of projects), or novelty (landing on the fricking moon).

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I think Google's total cost is more than $100-200 billion. It's a bit hard to pin down what "total cost" means in this context, though. But their 2017 operating expenses were $82 billion. Each year is higher than the last, but if you add up the last four years, they're over $250 billion.

Facebook is about an order of magnitude less, so the Apollo program fits nicely between them.

> It's a bit hard to pin down what "total cost" means in this context, though.

I realise looking back that comparing a company to a project/program isn't really correct. One kind ends, the other tries very hard not to end.

Well, I did say they were smaller projects :)

But you're of course right that I exaggerated a bit for effect. I do that sometimes.

My point still stands if you slice a few orders of magnitude off my hyperbole.

I don't disagree that Google and Facebook do enormous amounts of difficult engineering (I recently saw a USAF slide which compared Google's R&D spending on software to the entire defence industry's).

But the Apollo program and the Manhattan project were something else. Arguably they represent the historical highwater marks in terms of megaprojects which had effectively unlimited resources in the face of wide-open, unsolved problems.

If rockets were built like software ... (insert joke)

400k - wow that puts things to scale. This sort of comparison really should have been in my schooling textbooks.

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