[Retric]

Inflation adjustments don’t really work well for projects like this across such different periods. Project Mercury spent $277 million (1965) or 2.6 billion (2022) to get 20 uncrewed developmental flights and 6 crewed orbital launches plus all associated R&D.

Which seems insane by modern standards, Mercury however wasn’t quite that efficient, manpower costs for example have risen faster than inflation. Which makes a huge difference for non automated tasks like building novel spacecraft.

Similarly a barrel of oil in 1969 was $3.09 or 25$ today vs the actual price of 82$ today.

[somenameforme]

You're conflating rockets. The rockets used during the Mercury program [1] were literally retrofitted ICBMs designed to deliver nukes. It offered a great proof of concept and kept prices extremely low, but is nowhere near what's need for things like a Moon mission. It had a payload capacity of ~3,000 pounds!

As for oil, its price is largely driven by geopolitics, not inflation. In April 2020 prices were all the way down to below $20 a barrel. [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_LV-3B

[2] - https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil

[Retric]

That doesn’t make as large a difference as you might think. The Falcon Heavy is dramatically cheaper than the Falcon 9 per kg even though it’s the same company and very similar hardware. Rockets just scale really well.

Also, those missions needed a capsule not just the rocket and more importantly a great deal of R&D.

PS: April 2020 prices were due to drastic decreases in demand due to the pandemic not politics. Many current oil ‘wells’ ie oil sands lose money at even 60$/barrel therefore the market price needs to be higher than that or supply is reduced.

[somenameforme]

If you haven't seen it, "The Right Stuff" is an absolutely awesome movie about this era. Of course it takes some dramatic liberties, but is overall also quite historically accurate. So one fun anecdote, that really happened, is that these capsules/suits were so barebones that there wasn't even urine collection. The pilot was expected to simply 'hold it.' In one launch, there was a delay of 4 hours and Alan Shepard ended up pissing his suit - resulting in short circuits among the telemetry. The solution on the next flights was for astronauts to wear rubber pants... seriously! [1]

Put another way, these guys were being treated like a glorified version of Laika [2], and they knew it. It was all about achieving the mission goal as quickly and cheaply as possible. Everything else was secondary. This sort of stuff wouldn't pass muster in a million years in modern times, which again gets back to the original topic.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Pilot_accommod...

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

[themadturk]

The book is even better than the (great) movie. The Mercury astronauts had to fight to get a window in the capsule and some amount of control over the attitude jets. They didn't mind being expendable -- they were test pilots, after all -- but they didn't want NASA to forget that they were pilots, not passengers.