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Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

No need to be condescending when communication is ambiguous. Your question can be better phrased as, "How much did it cost for Saturn V to reach the point where it could successfully orbit?" which I assume means "how much did it cost up to and including Apollo 4?"

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Wouldn't the cost of all of Mercury and Gemini missions need to be included in this as they could not have Apollo without the others first.

Those weren't on the Saturn V, though. They were various rockets for Mercury, and Titan II for Gemini.

Do you think they would/could have built the Saturn V without building the other engines first?

If we're going down this road, we'd have to include the global GDP back thousands of years. I asked specifically about Saturn V so I could make a reasonable comparison between it and Starship.

What about the costs paid by the Song dynasty to develop rockets in the 13th century!

Never mind that. Remember that Grug had to die from eating poisonous mushrooms for the first time, all so we could have disposable plastic forks.

I think as phrased this is going to get way too pedantic. But I think it raises a larger point which is worthy to consider.

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.

>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.

> Saturn V was launched 13 times in total. Starship is already 75% of the way there

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

Starship is 75% of the way to 13 launches. That's just mathematically correct.

And is absolutely useless. Apollo 9-17 went to the moon with human occupants. All but one put men on the surface of the moon. They all returned to Earth with zero fatally exploding ships.

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

Dude, when did I say they were triumphant? SpaceX is burning taxpayer money sending empty coke cans on ballistic trajectories for no good reason. My whole point with this line of inquiry has been to point out what a useless waste of resources Starship has been so far.

> Starship is already 75% of the way there and hasn't orbited once

Read it as "Starship is already 75% of the way to that cost and hasn't orbited once" (you seem to be in agreement)

But who will get to 100 launches first? 1000? Saturn V was in one way a great success that will be remembered for all of history. But in another it was a failure due to your exact statement. It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible.

Neither will.

>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!"

Actually, "let's build a cheaper one and hope it works out" is the design philosophy here, and it's a very effective one across pretty much all domains. The fact that it's bigger too is mostly incidental to its economic case. You think we would have stopped at Apollo 17 if the same Saturn V was capable of flying Apollo 18 - 30?

Hadn't we already built the Saturn V for Apollo 18, 19, and 20?

Starship has already reached orbit many times but places itself on a suborbital trajectory to intentionally test re-entry and landing which it has done successfully several times.

Wrong. Starship has yet to orbit the planet. Certainly not "many" times, considering this is only its tenth flight.

They've already demonstrated they can orbit, they just choose not to. Reaching orbit and orbiting the planet are two different things. Saying that that is not reaching orbit is like saying McDonalds is failing at serving breakfast all day because they chose not to serve breakfast after 11:00 to meet their goals.

>Reaching orbit and orbiting the planet are two different things.

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.

In your world, you can't run even though you get up to running speed but you chose to walk. You sound so dumb.

So you think SpaceX isn't building on the shoulders of giants?

There are teams of incredible engineers working there because NASA paved the way.

And then we also need to add the costs of the V2, because surely we wouldn't have had Mercury and Gemini without the V2 first... and of course we wouldn't have that if the Chinese hadn't developed the first rockets in the 13th century, so we need to figure out their development costs. Where does it stop?

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