[InclinedPlane]

We sent people to the Moon decades ago for roughly a billion dollars per astronaut (adjusted for inflation). That's the incremental cost, not even including development costs. It's no wonder we never went back to the Moon, it wasn't sustainable. Even crewed spaceflight in general has been questionably sustainable. The ISS cost over $100 billion to assemble.

SpaceX has been driving not just innovation but a much faster pace of innovation. Landing rockets, reusing rocket stages of orbital launchers, developing crewed spacecraft on a budget roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than the way government procurement works. Etc, etc, etc. Ten years ago there had been zero Falcon 9 launches. Today the Falcon 9 makes up the majority of commercial orbital launch traffic, has flown over 60 times, has been landed over 20 times, and has been reused nearly 20 times. And the pace is accelerating. They're working on new engines, new vehicles, new ideas. All of which has dramatically shaken up spaceflight and opened up the possibility of a new space age where access to space is a lot cheaper and more routine than it has been.