[stickfigure]

The internet says: "The Apollo program's total cost was about $25.4 billion, about $152 billion in today's dollars."

That's about Google's entire revenue for 2020. I don't think even Google could put a man on the moon at those rates. Literal moonshots are expensive.

[scottLobster]

That's the total cost over the decade+ the program was in existence. Divide by 10 and it becomes roughly 10% of Google's revenue.

So it wouldn't be insubstantial, but they could fund a similar effort if they really wanted to. Shareholders would have a thing or two to say about that though, which is why Elon Musk is keeping SpaceX private.

[xyzzyz]

Sending 2nd rocket to the moon was much cheaper than the first one, so you can’t just divide by 10.

[knorker]

That's not what the poster meant. It wasn't counting rockets, but the fact that the cost was spread out over multiple years.

Yes, if it were possible to go from zero to moon in one year then that would be all of Google revenue. But spread over 10 years that's just 10% per year.

[jimhi]

The parent comment's point is that the money spent on the space program was likely very highly weighted to the first years building that first rocket. So dividing by 10 because it was roughly a decade is probably underestimating the budget needed to get to the moon.

[knorker]

Yes, but even pessimistically Google could send one rocket to the moon in 10 years with only 10% revenue.

[walrus01]

At the peak of Apollo program spending in 1966, Dreier says, NASA accounted for roughly 4.4% of the federal budget — 6.6% of discretionary spending — more than the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-how-much...

as a percentage of the yearly federal budget, it's not that extreme.

I believe the DoD budget (entirely non-NASA) is presently running around 700 billion a year.

some very quick searching tells me the total federal budget is something like 3500 billion a year. 4.4% of that would be 154bn a year.

[Aeolun]

I think SpaceX could put a man on the moon for much less? We’re currently at a few billion to put a whole horde of them on Mars I believe.

[sgt101]

We don't have the technology to get a person to Mars or to land them when they get there. We probably have the technology to build a spaceship that they could die in on the way there - but that's the closest that we realistically have.

[Dylan16807]

Surviving on the way to Mars isn't a huge leap in difficulty over a space station, and we have those on lock.

[ForHackernews]

There's much greater radiation exposure away from Earth's magnetic field. I believe this is still an unsolved problem. Proposed solutions for shielding are heavy and expensive.

[Dylan16807]

You just have to keep the lights on and not die of cancer for six months. The radiation isn't that bad.

Edit: The specific number is under 2 millisievert per day. And "One sievert carries with it a 5.5% chance of eventually developing fatal cancer based on the linear no-threshold model."

[DEADBEEFC0FFEE]

I though shielding with water was the way forward there.

[sgt101]

In science fiction novels...

[mFixman]

It's much harder if you include the return trip.

[Dylan16807]

You have to keep things going for 3 years, but I think such a trip is still pretty straightforward with our current abilities.

But wow what a drawn-out load of nothing a mission like that would be.

[sgt101]

No resupply, no spares - no chance.

[ForHackernews]

> We’re currently at a few billion to put a whole horde of them on Mars I believe.

Uh... don't count your Mars shots before they're hatched. Even getting robot probes to Mars is very very hard. Only about half of Mars missions have been successful. In fact, since the fall of the Soviet Union only one organisation has succeeded in putting working probes on the Martian surface: NASA/JPL.

I don't think it's impossible that SpaceX will get there, but certainly not soon and not for "a few billion". If they succeed at all, it will require drawing on years on investment and expertise by NASA.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/historical-l...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53589767

[ves]

I don’t think anyone was alleging that google should be literally landing people on the moon, so invoking the economics of moon landings specifically is hardly relevant.

[ekianjo]

> The internet says: "The Apollo program's total cost was about $25.4 billion, about $152 billion in today's dollars."

And SpaceX will soon have the capability to do it with zillion times less. Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can.

[qayxc]

> Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can.

More like "if the hard groundwork has been done 60 years ago". It's not as if SpaceX had to quite literally invent the orbital rocket.

So after 60 years of manned spaceflight, 9 manned lunar missions, and 30 years of flying reusable crewed vehicles with a space station that has been permanently crewed since 1998 someone better do it MUCH more cheaply.

The culprit isn't just "space is hard" - it's decades of cost-plus contracts and heavy government involvement that kept costs high and results low.

[snoshy]

A public funding source can provide that kind of support for a decade, but even for the likes of Google that's a stretch.

I prefer to think of a moonshot as longer than a longshot, whatever that might be worth.

It sure is sad though, coming from the acquisition before Google X that had just so many great players throughout.