Easy answer. Far less money is being given today to NASA:
Further, that NASA budget includes all the extra planetary science happening (multiple Mars rovers, Deep Space network, LEO space station operations, deep space probes like DART, Juno, OSIRIS-REx, etc, plus all of the atmospheric flight stuff like the low noise supersonic flight experiments. This also includes all of SLS which is a SECOND rocket being made for Moon exploration.
To answer your second question: yes, reuse is worth it. We didn’t do it during Apollo because it would have been even more expensive. Because we didn’t have it, any flight was just as expensive as the first. So we had to stop going unless the crazy amount of money would stay, which it wouldn’t.
transientpunk@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Different design paradigms. In 1969, they had one shot to get everything right, and prepared accordingly (not to mention, they had a massive budget since the space race was all part of the cold war).
SpaceX is taking a different approach, fail fast and cheap. They are taking an iterative approach that allows them to learn from previous failures, rather than anticipating what all those failures could be and then over engineering the rocket to prevent that.
They are different approaches, and each has their own pros and cons. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3volver@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s a great summary, I appreciate it. Do you think the new approach has been worth it so far? The Artemis 1 launch was successful first try.
MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The Artemis 1 launch was also staggeringly expensive, and yet to be repeated.
In the time it’s taken to develop that rocket, SpaceX has gone from it’s very first real flight (by which I mean actually achieving something, rather than a pure test flight) to launching far more every year than the entire rest of the world combined. Note that by that definition, Artemis hasn’t had a single “real” flight yet.
mipadaitu@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They have completely different goals. If SpaceX wanted to throw out the Starship and Booster sections every time, they’re already as capable as the Artemis launcher. But they are looking longer term, and want to also be 1000x cheaper.
It took them dozens of launches to be able to re-use a Falcon9. They’ll get there eventually.
Nobody thought they’d get Falcon 9 to launch, and they did. Nobody thought they’d get Falcon 9 to land, and they did. Nobody thought they’d be able to re-use a Falcon 9 enough to make it worth the investment, and they did.
Doesn’t mean they’ll succeed, but it does mean they have a good track record.
Zippy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
To put it in context, Artemis did many fully destructive tests but typically on the ground. Artemis had and spent an overhaul budget that was likely close to a hundred times that of what SpaceX is spending in today’s dollars.
And even better representation, all the fully destructive tests of SpaceX have carried out have costs less than a single successful shuttle launch. And it has a much larger payload.
Even with the destructive tests, of which are planned this way, not only is SpaceX is far cheaper than any past space program, they are advancing fairly rapid.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Well, they’ve produced the first, (and only so far), truly reusable rocket.
And starship is slated to be the second.