[dotnet00]

That's comparing budget of a program to NASA's overall budget, ignoring that NASA hasn't been pouring its overall budget into a single lunar program since then (lack of political will), and ignoring that many of the recent landers are explicitly cheaper missions intended to have some risk of failure, either because the country attempting the landing has never done it before, or because they're trying to stimulate private competition in the industry.

[somenameforme]

Absolutely. But you're also not really considering that that was starting from literally nothing, and going at a hyper-accelerated rate. Now that we have that knowledge, to say nothing of a million other technological improvements, costs ought be dramatically lower. And indeed the Falcon Heavy's entire development cost about $500 million, over about 3 years of active development. [1]

The SLS, which is NASA's latest ship - being developed by Boeing/Lockheed, started 13 years ago and has, so far, cost more than $30 billion (the costs listed on Wiki are 5 years outdated). [2] If/when it is ever completed, its ideal goal will be to carry ~2x as much as a Falcon Heavy, at a launch cost about of well over 20x as much.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Conception_and_fu...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

[dotnet00]

I agree that costs should be lower, and they are indeed coming down. That's the intent of stimulating private competition, to replicate what Falcon did for rocketry.

We'd have gotten on this path sooner and the waste that is SLS wouldn't have existed, if Congress+MIC hadn't intentionally misaligned incentives to suppress progress in favor of profit for decades.