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Comment by flerchin | Hacker News Reader

How did the folks in the 60s do this? Starship is going to be vastly more capable, but it's not finished, and it's vastly more complex.

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Lots of money, only landing two people in a foil can with very little additional payload capacity, and not staying very long.

Apollo cost something like $300 billion in 2023 dollars.

NASA's contract for the Starship landing is $2.9b. SLS development has been around $12b with a marginal cost of $4b per launch.

All together the Artemis program (SLS, Orion, Lunar Gateway Space Station, and Landers) is estimated to cost around $93b through 2025.

The Apollo LEM had a payload capacity in the neighborhood of 1T. The Starship Lunar Lander is supposed to handle 100T+

> How did the folks in the 60s do this?

A huge commitment of resources relative to national output (2.5% of GDP over a decade—that's spending annually about 70% of what the US currently spends on defense), limited mission scope, limited planning for anything to be usable beyond “get to the moon”, and higher risk tolerance.

Also, counting both unmanned tests as part of the program, the 1960s moon program (Gemini + Apollo programs) took more than 20 launches given all that.

High risk tolerance in a war-torn era which held military pilot lives cheap, expendable, noble to sacrifice.

(Not commenting which mindset is wiser or foolish-er; just think it worth highlighting, underscoring how starkly different our eras' mindsets are. I think it's worth pondering. Do you even know how many workmen died in the trenches of the Apollo Program industry? I don't have a clue either. That one SpaceX employee died on the job is national news in our time—in the 50's-60's, all blue-collar jobs were orders of magnitude more horrible).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... is a start? Probably doesn't take into account contractor lives offsite or heart attacks offsite, etc.

I've read a couple histories of the Apollo program, and they spared no effort to keep the astronauts safe.

The Apollo 1 fire came close to causing the entire program to be shut down.

That generations safety obsession lost us space for a generation, in the same way their no-nuke fixation lit our only planet on fire.

These are the sins of my parents.

The Apollo Lunar Module had 6.7m³ volume. Starship HLS should have around 1000m³.

Apollo LM had about a 5 ton dry mass. Starship LM would be probably well over 200.

Apollo LM got around with a ton of stages. Starship LM gets around with refueling flights.

They did it by not trying to land a huge fueled rocket on the Moon (on its tail!) and then have the whole thing take off again. The rocket equation bites you in the ass very quickly once you commit to a 1950's sci-fi style landing with a big silver rocket that you insist on taking home with you.

I don't know what you mean by more'capable' in this context if the system needs 20 times the launches and nonexistent technology (in-orbit refueling) to achieve the same goal.

This is the answer. Apollo missions were essentially 6 stages (3 to orbit then TLI, lunar descent stage, lunar ascent stage, CSM). Maybe 7 if you count dropping the service module for reentry.

The whole concept of starship only works if they can launch reliably a couple times a day

Much more money was spent, and mass to the lunar surface was far smaller than the Starship lander.

Money, brains, and a perceived existential threat from the Soviet Union.

I was a toddler when the Soviet Union dissolved, do you think the public/cultural perception of China, of Russia, or of middle-eastern terrorists that we have today is of a similar character to the Soviet bogeyman?

Also, I don't think that brains have changed that much in the past 60 years. Many of our best and brightest are now in fintech or adtech instead of manufacturing and research groups, but I wouldn't say that better brains were why the Saturn program succeeded when Starship seems to be as much of a challenge today (rather, I'd say the goalposts in economics, risk, and capacity have shifted).

> public/cultural perception of China, of Russia, or of middle-eastern terrorists that we have today is of a similar character to the Soviet bogeyman?

I don't think so, i was a kid but remember breaking news on TV of Russian strategic bombers enroute to the US only to turn away at the last second. It was day by day whether society ended or not during the cold war.

China is where my iPhone is made (and everything else). Middle East is where my oil comes from. Russia is in a stalemate with a former satellite country whose main export is grain.

They don't make a good antagonist.

Could be surprising, but some kids of the day in the Soviet Union were more fearful (well... wrong word...) of Chinese nukes rather than American ones.

Single use 'Hail Mary' style rockets

More middlemen these days, all looking for their handouts.

More middlemen?

(pdf warning) https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...

> Since the 1990s, the defense sector has consolidated substantially, transitioning from 51 to 5 aerospace and defense prime contractors.

Also- if an entity is performing work under contract and gets paid for it how is that a handout?

I'm not necessarily agreeing with the poster above, but surely the number of prime contractors is not relevant to the number of non-prime sub-contractors?

Artemis is less expensive than Apollo, at least so far.

There is definitely a fighting over handouts component, but this mostly seems to be at the Congressional level where they legislate how the rocket will be built and what kind of boosters it will have, and those requirements have a habit of lining up nicely with existing defense contractors in the states they represent.

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