This is why SpaceX, with their single factory, are something like an order of magnitude cheaper.
That's a pretty bad excuse: leaving the same money with the taxpayers would have funded jobs that actually did something people wanted enough to pay with their own money.
There is plenty of waste, but it’s significantly smaller than the direct costs suggest. Especially when such programs reduce unemployment as the economy is not out useful labor, and taxes collect a significant portion of the outlay back.
New Mexico?
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...
Assume Bob could do something and get paid 50k per year, government pays Bob 50k/year to stay at home. Bob makes 50k either way.
But, if Bob does not work for a year then the economy loses 50k/year worth of labor, that’s true if bob makes 40k staying at home or 200k staying at home. It’s also true if the government pays Bob to do something that creates zero value.
Manhattan project: 30 billion (2012 dollars)
Apollo program: 83 billion (2005 dollars)
Shuttle program: 196 billion (2011 dollars)
2008 bailouts: 700 billion (2008 dollars)
Iraq war: over 1 trillion dollars
That's right, both the Iraq war and the 2008 bailouts each dwarf the entire space program. Yet which thing attracts more hand wringing about costs? Which things require years of tiresome political wrangling, and which happened at the snap of a finger?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-def...
It really puts into perspective how many things commonly held to be incredibly difficult, or expensive, are in fact simply not a priority. Almost any pie-in-the-sky technological project or public works project you can think of utterly pales next to the money that is casually spent on dubious causes like propping up broken financial systems and destabilizing foreign countries.
Maybe we should stop using "Manhattan Project" or "moonshot" to refer to huge, ambitious practically unfundable government works, when they're so cheap in the scheme of things. Maybe we should speak of "bailouts" instead.
As long as it worked, who cares?
It doesn’t examine the manner of resource usage, and the returned benefits for each cost.
In one case, they built a car and a garage to fix many cars in.
In the other case, they built a car off some value and drove it off a cliff. For the price, could we not have also obtained a matching garage?
That makes sense, especially seeing the arsenal and industry grow as it did in the wake of the war.
The thing that leaves me curious is that despite the massive spending on the space program, we never see the same assembly line, or perhaps transit system, emerge from the spending.
With the space program, it would seem that all of the effort and financing really did get consumed by each moonshot, with no investment to back it up, and formulate repeatable process and the ready facility to continiously grow the number of people in orbit, and cycle rockets through their trajectories.
The nuclear energy/weapons complex and the space program seem to be comparable endeavors, but one paved the way for sustainable operations while the other produced a series of events and little else. It doesn’t seem plausible to just wave one’s hands and say that rockets are that expensive, so what gives?