Yes, but the approach is very different. This more of a '(star)ship and iterate' way of working. There's also the cost factor - each Saturn launch was around $1.5 billion in today's dollars. Whereas the projected budget for Starship for the entirety of 2023 was around $2 billion. Once they start launching commercially then Musk expects a launch to come down to around $10 million - even if he's wildly out then it's still going to cost at least an order of magnitude less to launch than a Saturn. Then there's the capacity; Saturn could take ~120 tonnes to LEO whereas Starship will carry ~150 tonnes.

I'm no fan of Musk by any means, but you only have to look at the Falcon program to see how successful Spacex has been. I have no doubt that Starship will work out.

Yes, in exchange for an investment that constituted a non-trivial portion of the GDP of a superpower near the peak of its trajectory.

There’s a reason words like “unsustainable” are so often associated with the Apollo program. It was amazing, but it couldn’t be a model for continued progress.

Early in the development of the Saturn-V they had issues with thrust instability in the F1 engine (in the worst cases causing it to explode). They had trouble diagnosing the issue (and blew up some engines) before they came up with the idea of setting off a small bomb inside the engine to trigger instability on demand (destroying some more engines).

Do you consider that a failure of the Saturn-V program? Or do you understand the value of testing prototype hardware to destruction?

They also ditched every one of their boosters into the ocean. Not one Saturn V booster landed itself back on the launchpad. Different approaches warrant different metrics of success.

In SpaceX's case, they've done this exact process before with the Falcon to great success. In a few years, Starship launches will likely be a routine thing, as Falcon launches are now.

I love spending 1% of the GDP to make sure my big pile of metal doesn’t explode.

I think it was more that we had a different notion of how much money we were willing to spend on it back then.

Apollo was a one off government program, which was unrivaled for 50 years. And never even tried since then.

You have to understand this is a private business doing it on a budget and fast. Yes, NASA is involved...

I think "mixed" would be a better term, but the explosion was, IIUC, the built-in "destroy this rocket because something is going wrong" system, and I'm not sure if we even had those back in the Apollo days ("not sure" in the literal sense, maybe we did and I just never heard about it).

I have personally seen a video of a Saturn (unmanned), launching, that rose maybe half its height off the ground, stopped, descended back down, hit the launchpad, and blew up. That's pretty much "on launch".

But that doesn't seem to have been a Saturn V. What was it? I'm pretty sure it was on Youtube, but a quck search failed to turn it up.

So, maybe "not one Saturn V blew up on launch", but one of the Saturns did.

Did the Saturn V turn around, come back and land, and then be used again for another launch? Maybe I missed that part?

This is a pretty comical response to one of the hardest efforts in human history. You do realize the hundreds of blow ups that happened to get them to the point the Saturn V working right?

Move fast and break things.

Applies perfectly and seems to be working for SpaceX

Apollo 1