According to wikipedia, the entire cost of the saturn v project was US$185 million, equivalent to US$33.6 billion today. That's from R&D to all launches
> Project cost US$6.417 billion (equivalent to $33.6 billion in 2023)
> Cost per launch US$185 million (equivalent to $969 million in 2023)
That a manned Apollo mission would/did cost under a billion dollars (todays money) is surprisingly cheap. A single Artemis launch using the Space Launch System (SLS) costs an eye watering $4 billions.
Different metric:
> [1966] NASA received its largest total budget of $4.5 billion, about 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States at that time.
Using that metric NASA yearly budget would with todays GDP be $150 billion dollars.
SLS is also a pretty weird design due to reusing Shuttle components for a completely different kind of launcher. This saves development costs (maybe) by using existing stuff that has already been developed, but the unsuitability of those components for this system increases per-launch costs. Once NASA runs out of old Shuttle engines, manufacturing new ones is going to cost $100 million apiece if not more, and each launch needs four of them. It was OK for Shuttle engines to be expensive since they were supposed to be amortized over hundreds of flights (and in practice were actually amortized across at least tens of flights) but now they’re being used in expendable launches. If Starship even comes remotely close to its goals, an entire launch will cost less than a single SLS engine.
That said, it would be interesting to have someone really knowledgeable go over what it is that Artemis has and Saturn V didn't, and then break them down and assign each an approximate proportion of the cost delta.
This represents less than 0.5% of the total U.S. federal budget, though it’s one of the most visible and impactful science agencies
There are teams of incredible engineers working there because NASA paved the way.
Presumably what we're trying to get at is, in broad strokes, "is Starship more cost-effective to develop than Saturn V" (and I assume the follow-on for that will be to compare the "NASA approach" vs the "SpaceX approach")
But you raise a good point in that the baseline playing field is completely different. The existing knowledge each program started with, be it in materials science, understanding of rocket combustion, heat shield technology, electronics, simulation ability, you name it, it's completely different. So we can find and pull out whatever numbers, but I don't think it's possible for them to say anything meaningful for comparison on their own.
It depends on how different they are. Saturn V was launched 13 times in total. Starship is already 75% of the way there and hasn't orbited once. Ignoring R&D and just going by launch costs alone, that's USD 4B (2025) to orbit 1 Saturn V, vs USD x to orbit 1 Starship, where x >= 1B.
Apollo 1 - lost on the launch pad, crew killed. very bad Apollo 13 - major malfunction causing loss of mission but crew saved. very not bad
Starship - 10 launches 5 failures. No crew ever so that pressure is also not comparable.
Are we really claiming Starship has achieved 75% of the results of Apollo? That's absolutely ludicrous
Not one of these triumphant 75% achievement in launch numbers would have had a surviving human. Apollo had 0 practice runs. Starship is nothing but practice runs. To equate the number of launches to something so drastically different is just an exercise in futility that I can only assume you're trolling
Read it as "Starship is already 75% of the way to that cost and hasn't orbited once" (you seem to be in agreement)
>It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible.
"There aren't many uses for such a gigantic rocket. Let's make an even bigger one and hope it works out!"
LOL. Are you serious?
To reach orbit: to reach a horizontal speed such that the spacecraft can complete a revolution around the celestial object while in free fall, without having to execute any additional maneuvers.
Starship has yet to reach orbit. The reason doesn't matter. It hasn't done it.