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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

I fucking hate this graph so much.

Its a total misunderstanding of the problem. Budget as % of federal spending is totally meaningless measure. And it causes far more confusion then it explains anything.

Agencies don't send % of federal budget when they buy some aluminum sheets, they pay in $s.

Of course the % of federal budget goes down when you have vietnam, great society and so on and so on.

So this graph is just used to make excuses for NASA performance. In effect NASA budget now is actually not that different from the Apollo area. And in the last 5 years, NASA budget has gone up.

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Good point, so I looked up inflation-adjusted Apollo costs, which came to $257 billion.[1] By contrast, SLS so far has been closer to $20 billion.[2]

But I don't see this as excusing NASA/Congress. It's spending that money with the benefit of 50 years of technological advancement, but reusing technology from the 1980s to make a completely disposable rocket that will cost $4 billion per launch.[3] Meanwhile, SpaceX is spending an amount estimated in single-digit billions to develop a rapidly and completely reusable rocket of similar size, aiming at a launch cost two to three orders of magnitude lower.

[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

[2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion

[3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reve...

Apollo was many missions, totally bootstrapping and industry, plus lots and lots of infrastructure. This included all the subsystems, multiple engines and so on and so on.

SLS since 2011 cost $20 billion, add $20 billion for Orion. Add to that 5-10$ billion in infrastructure. These 50 billion $, didn't pay for the development of a single engine.

Yep, the Apollo cost includes eight trips to the moon (landing or flyby) plus several trips to LEO. That's another $50B or so tacked onto Artemis just for the SLS launch costs. That takes us to $100B total, to reproduce something done 50 years ago with an engine from 40 years ago. Plus it doesn't include the landing module, which SpaceX is working on.

I agree that the graph is misleading, but your response is misleading as well. It looks like we spent more than twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars at the peak in 1966 (49 billion) as at the peak in 2021 (23 billion), and generally we spent 1.5x-2.5x as much during the Apollo era vs. the last decade.

Oh, I thought it was closer. On avg it might be closer.

Given how much technology has advanced and how much more technology and knowlage is available, it should be much cheaper to do the same.

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