It's recently gotten way cheaper.

Cost per kilogram delivered to LEO:

Saturn V (used for the Moon landing mission): $8,250

Falcon 9: $2,700 (price for an expendable launch)

BFR (hypothetical, in development rocket): $500

In inflation adjusted dollars? I would have still thought its 10X cheaper now because of all the learnings plus much lower cost computing and other engineering enhancements.

Back in 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program reported to Congress was $25.4 billion. By far the most expensive parts of the mission were the Apollo spacecraft (the Command Modules, the Lunar Modules) and the monstrous Saturn V launch vehicles. A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today’s money, a few billion dollars.

In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars (or around $200 billion in today’s money). Compare these costs to modern day space travel, where companies like SpaceX charge just $133 million to launch a spacecraft to the International Space Station. The Falcon Heavy, which will be comparable to the Saturn IV, will be in the same price region.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-la...

Safety. Back then it was basically part of the Cold War. Today, what are you asking the people to risk their lives for? Making things civilian-safe is expensive.

People risk their lives all the time for sillier reasons than going to space, sometimes without even getting paid for it.

Sure, so we might not stop an eccentric rich adventurer from self-funding an effort like this. But that doesn't necessarily mean the government would sponsor it, or allow people to be employed to do it.

Well if your justification for that is because people might die, I'm afraid you'll find that the government is more than happy to sponsor and employ people for projects with rather high fatality rates.

Aside from the military? Federal projects are very safety conscious. That was the whole point.

I pulled the Saturn V and Falcon numbers from Wikipedia, which were in 2016 dollars.

Does that scale to a full lunar mission though?

Just because it's cheaper to take the bus downtown doesn't say anything about the cost of airfare to another continent.

Depends on your design. The Saturn V was big enough to launch the entire lunar stack of vehicles in one shot. Anything less than that requires in orbit assembly.

IIRC: Saturn V could put 100k pounds in lunar injection. The first SLS will be around 50k, the Falcon Heavy around 40k.

Layer versions of the SLS, should we choose to spend more tens of billions developing them, will eventually have Saturn V capabilities.

The BFR (as planned) will be the largest capacity rocket ever made. Putting 300k+ in low earth orbit. It’s designed to be refueled in orbit, so essentially it’s lunar/mars injection orbit payload caisvity is 300k+.

It’s also designed to be fully reusable, unlike the Falcon series that only reuses main boosters. So it’s claimed to be far cheaper than them, and they are already the most affordable rockets ever made.

The SLS is designed to be crushed and melted like a beer can after every launch, which is why it will cost $2B+ per launch.

The Falcon 9 isn't human-rated, and cost per kilogram doesn't cover everything - putting together 10 pieces in orbit would be really expensive.

Falcon 9 was designed to be human rated, hence the Dragon capsule. The lag in certification is probably largely due to Russian/USA politics.

I think the lag in certification partly came from NASA's risk assessment of some of SpaceX's plans. NASA increased focus on the risk of micormeteorite damage to the Dragon capsule while it is docked to the ISS, which has required additional shielding. Also NASA wants to see multiple Dragon flights with identical booster hardware before certifying the platform, and so far SpaceX has been iterating on Falcon a lot. Falcon 9 Block 5 is supposed to be the final iteration, so Dragon V2 certification has also been blocked on that.

Space Shuttle $50,000

SLS: $15,000

Falcon Heavy: $700

Wow, I had no idea the Shuttle was so crazy high. Wikipedia says it ranged from $16.5k - $50k, not sure on what basis. I guess the drastic cut in launch rate must have really tanked the efficiency of the program.

actually I was a little high. It’s cost per launch was $1.5B in 2011 dollars ($193B over 133 flights). It’s cargo capacity was only about 40,000 lbs, so around $37,000 per lb.

The truth was it’s stack had massive launch capacity, over 200,000 lbs. but it was almost all used up by lifting that space plane. A higher launch rate was never really possible. The solid boosters weren’t reusable without a huge amount of work, and the shuttles needed lots of maintainance between flights.

The BFR is designed with theses lessons in mind. It’s fully reusable and it’s seconf stage should be way more efficient. But we will have see how much maintenance it will require between flights.

Yeah, unfortunately there were a ton of compromises as NASA had to get funding support from other agencies, which resulted in a design that didn't meet their original goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process is an interesting read.

It would be way cheaper to do it today. Apollo cost about $110 billion, adjusted for inflation. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket (which could easily do the moon too) will cost $10 billion. Even if they're off by a factor of 2 or more (and their history suggest they aren't), that's still massively less expensive.