<story><title>Just another Apollo? Part two (2005)</title><url>https://www.thespacereview.com/article/507/1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmyeet</author><text>The Apollo missions were awe-inspiring, particularly given the tech at the time. But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive. I see inflation-adjusted numbers putting the Saturn V launch cost at just over $1 billion but I honestly think the equivalent is way more than that.&lt;p&gt;The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $&amp;#x2F;kg to LEO terms).&lt;p&gt;Payload costs are now &amp;lt;10% of the Saturn V&amp;#x2F;STS costs in real terms. That&amp;#x27;s what we need. If Satrship lives up to expectations, that&amp;#x27;ll drop even further. In addition to that there are important advancements in scalability (ie how many launch vehicles you can product and that really translates to how many launches you can do per year) and reliability.&lt;p&gt;My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn&amp;#x27;t sustainable. Lots of people like to say things like we&amp;#x27;d already have put a man on Mars if we didn&amp;#x27;t cancel Apollo but that was never going to happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CWuestefeld</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no contradiction here. It&amp;#x27;s resolved because, relative to its original promise, the STS program was a complete failure. Yes, it did wind up doing a bunch of useful stuff. But it didn&amp;#x27;t achieve nearly as much as was promised, and what it did do cost vastly more than anticipated.&lt;p&gt;Source: my grandfather. He was a project manager on the Hubble, and specifically on the ill-fated mirror, this being simultaneously his greatest pride and greatest embarrassment. We talked about this stuff often. According to gramps, and not denying that there were major errors in the Hubble mirror management, they wound up getting screwed by the STS failures. It was always understood that the mirror wouldn&amp;#x27;t be perfect because they expected to be unable to perfectly compensate for the deflection of the mirror due to gravity while it was being manufactured. The STS promised the ability to deliver the Hubble to orbit to test it, and bring it back down again to correct if necessary. In the end, something like this was eventually required, but only many years later, and not in the fashion that the initial STS mission would have allowed.</text></comment>
<story><title>Just another Apollo? Part two (2005)</title><url>https://www.thespacereview.com/article/507/1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmyeet</author><text>The Apollo missions were awe-inspiring, particularly given the tech at the time. But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive. I see inflation-adjusted numbers putting the Saturn V launch cost at just over $1 billion but I honestly think the equivalent is way more than that.&lt;p&gt;The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $&amp;#x2F;kg to LEO terms).&lt;p&gt;Payload costs are now &amp;lt;10% of the Saturn V&amp;#x2F;STS costs in real terms. That&amp;#x27;s what we need. If Satrship lives up to expectations, that&amp;#x27;ll drop even further. In addition to that there are important advancements in scalability (ie how many launch vehicles you can product and that really translates to how many launches you can do per year) and reliability.&lt;p&gt;My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn&amp;#x27;t sustainable. Lots of people like to say things like we&amp;#x27;d already have put a man on Mars if we didn&amp;#x27;t cancel Apollo but that was never going to happen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>towaway15463</author><text>You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. If the space shuttle was never pursued we could reasonably assume that its budget would have gone into a launch system like the Saturn V or even just kept cranking Saturn Vs out on the assembly line. If they were the case then it seems like many of their plans would have played out, the continued moon missions at least.</text></comment>