Hacker News Reader

Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

Uh huh.

Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.

This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.

Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.

An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.

And it sent 3 people to the moon and brought them back with no refueling.

60 years ago.

Saturn V worked well, but we seem to be forgetting that Apollo 1 killed three astronauts on Earth and Apollo 13 almost killed another three in space.

I never forget either. Both were failures of the command/service module design, not the rocket.

True, but ultimately Saturn V + Apollo was a stack intended to fly together, much like Booster + Starship. Both have/had to be reliable as a whole, with disastrous consequences if not. We can praise Saturn's V reliability, but it is just a part of the entire project, and it makes sense to judge the entire project as well.

That's an incredible achievement. But you seem to be ignoring the goals of Starship program - to make economically viable and reusable means of space transportation.

It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?

> Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.

Remind me again, how many orbital refuelings will it take to make starship reach the moon?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com