5 ms·
How much money did it cost to orbit Saturn V (including R&D of course)?
by fluoridation 1y ago
How much money did it cost to orbit Saturn V (including R&D of course)?
- voidUpdate 1y agoAccording to wikipedia, the entire cost of the saturn v project was US$185 million, equivalent to US$33.6 billion today. That's from R&D to all launches
- fluoridation 1y agoYes, I also can look trivial stuff up. That would include costs after the rocket first orbited the Earth, so it doesn't answer my question.
- anonymars 1y agoNo 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?"
- dylan604 1y agoWouldn'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.
- fluoridation 1y agoThose weren't on the Saturn V, though. They were various rockets for Mercury, and Titan II for Gemini.
- dylan604 1y agoDo you think they would/could have built the Saturn V without building the other engines first?
- fluoridation 1y agoIf 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.
- terminalshort 1y agoWhat about the costs paid by the Song dynasty to develop rockets in the 13th century!
- fluoridation 1y agoNever mind that. Remember that Grug had to die from eating poisonous mushrooms for the first time, all so we could have disposable plastic forks.
- anonymars 1y agoI 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.
- fluoridation 1y ago>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.
- thesmart 1y agoSo you think SpaceX isn't building on the shoulders of giants? There are teams of incredible engineers working there because NASA paved the way.
- terminalshort 1y agoAnd 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?
- ralfd 1y agoYou mis-copied the numbers for one launch. Wiki says: > Project cost US$6.417 billion (equivalent to $33.6 billion in 2023) > Cost per launch US$185 million (equivalent to $969 million in 2023) That a manned Apollo mission would/did cost under a billion dollars (todays money) is surprisingly cheap. A single Artemis launch using the Space Launch System (SLS) costs an eye watering $4 billions. Different metric: > [1966] NASA received its largest total budget of $4.5 billion, about 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States at that time. Using that metric NASA yearly budget would with todays GDP be $150 billion dollars.
- nashashmi 1y agoIn recent years, NASA’s budget has hovered around $25–27 billion. This represents less than 0.5% of the total U.S. federal budget, though it’s one of the most visible and impactful science agencies
- voidUpdate 1y agofacepalm not sure how I misread that
- mikepurvis 1y agoSome of this was the overall urgency of the 1960s space race, that people were motivated to cut through red tape and get it done, and I know it's also argued that modern safety standards and requirements around supply chain, real time monitoring, system redundancy, etc all complicate things and raise costs. That said, it would be interesting to have someone really knowledgeable go over what it is that Artemis has and Saturn V didn't, and then break them down and assign each an approximate proportion of the cost delta.
- wat10000 1y agoPart of the SLS cost comes from trying to save money. Yearly budgets are kept low, which spreads out the work over a long time. This makes everything cost more, but the politicians only care about the yearly spending. SLS is also a pretty weird design due to reusing Shuttle components for a completely different kind of launcher. This saves development costs (maybe) by using existing stuff that has already been developed, but the unsuitability of those components for this system increases per-launch costs. Once NASA runs out of old Shuttle engines, manufacturing new ones is going to cost $100 million apiece if not more, and each launch needs four of them. It was OK for Shuttle engines to be expensive since they were supposed to be amortized over hundreds of flights (and in practice were actually amortized across at least tens of flights) but now they’re being used in expendable launches. If Starship even comes remotely close to its goals, an entire launch will cost less than a single SLS engine.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- boxed 1y agoAdding to previous comment, looks like the cost per launch when the system was up and running was ~1billion USD inflation adjusted. I'm going to assume Starship will beat that easily.
- loeg 1y agoLooks like Starship test flights are already beating that $1 billion per-launch cost (I'm seeing estimates in the $100-500 million range), and they'd like to get the marginal cost down to ~$10 million.
- anonymars 1y agoI'm confused -- how is it meaningful to compare the cost of Starship test flights with operational Saturn V missions?
- fluoridation 1y agoThere were no Saturn V test flights like Starship is doing, that I can find info on. Wikipedia lists 3 tests before Apollo 4, which was the first full launch.
- anonymars 1y agoFrom context I interpreted GP to be somehow concluding that Starship is "cheaper" (these test flights are "beating" the price tag of the Saturn V launches), I'm gently pointing out I don't think that is a reasonable conclusion to draw based on empty suborbital test flights vs. taking humans to the moon and back
- fluoridation 1y agoIt would seem no one has the information I originally requested. All we have to go on for Saturn V is a per-launch cost where we don't know what's included. I agree it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but it seems to be all we have.
- thatoneguy 1y agoHow does that matter? It's doing a thing already done nearly 70 years ago but at its own pace. I bet it will get to the moon cheaper, too, and the Muskonauts will use less expensive lenses than Hasselblads to take photos.
- fluoridation 1y agoStarship isn't exactly the same as Saturn V. It's bigger, for one. The reason why it matters is that efficiency matters. It's fine if it takes longer, not so much if it costs way, way more, especially if such a huge rocket has limited applications. And as I understand it the consensus is that Starship (or at least a fully-loaded Starship) will never go to the Moon. Once it's in orbit it takes like twenty refueling launches and space rendezvous to fill it up again so it can make the transfer burn. In other words, it's never happening.
- stetrain 1y agoI think that understanding of the consensus is incorrect. The mission plan for Artemis 3 is that a specialized Starship upper stage will be refueled in LEO and then transfer to lunar orbit where it will wait for astronauts arriving on SLS/Orion. Yes the mission profile is more complex, but that complexity can mostly be settled before the astronauts launch on their mission. NASA seems to think it is a viable plan which is why they selected SpaceX to execute that part of the mission.
- fluoridation 1y agoWikipedia: > After a multi-phase design effort, on April 16, 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop Starship HLS and deliver it to near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) prior to arrival of the crew for use on the Artemis III mission. The delivery requires that Starship HLS be refueled in Earth orbit before boosting to the NRHO, and this refueling requires a pre-positioned propellant depot in Earth orbit that is filled by multiple (at least 14) tanker flights. I stand by what I said: not happening. I'll believe it when I see it. Can you imagine if to make a sightseeing trip to another city you had to stop in the middle of the highway and then make 14 round-trips with a second car to fill your first car back up? I can't imagine why someone would approve this plan, other than corruption.
- moralestapia 1y agoThe downvotes here are undeserved. There is nothing wrong with this question. Zero. Stop eroding this site's community.