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How did we get humans on the moon in 1969 and are still struggling to get the Starship rocket to launch properly?
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this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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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.
Plus SpaceX squanders far less money than the contractors that have sucked off the government teat via NASA for 50+ years.
Those bloated companies are part of the military-industrial complex and finance lobbying to push projects (especially cost-plus) which they can then "compete" for.
Don't get me wrong, I don't blame NASA, this is a problem of politicians and grubby bastards in companies like Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. NASA is controlled by congress and whoever is providing financing - the shuttle development history demonstrates these problems very clearly (competing requirements from Air Force, NSA, etc, who were providing funding).
At a high level, NASA, (like many government projects) have traditionally used more of a "Waterfall" project management approach, while SpaceX has used an iterative Agile-like approach. This means SpaceX can be more nimble while learning along the way, enabling them to change direction when they discover a fundamental misunderstanding. The first launch of Starship demonstrates this approach perfectly.
NASA was also different in 1960's.
People said they could have meeting with supplies and make changes in the meeting. Now it seems like everything is a huge ballache to change anything.