> It was “only” 12 years between Sputnik and Apollo 11.

12 years, and 4.4% of the federal budget (in the peak). In 2007 dollars they spend around $136 billion to get to the moon.

That sounds like a huge amount of money, until you consider the Shuttle programme alone cost the taxpayer apporx $196 billion, inflation adjusted.

How much is that in 2019 dollars?

About 166 billion, based off of CPI.

On the other hand, fixing it to 4.4% of the Federal Budget makes it $208.8 billion.

Its a fair point, just a matter of money and a limited number of manufacturers for the bits that make rockets fly. NASA had the advantage that as a single target they weren't overseeing three different SaturnVs, three different launch vehicles, etc. The horses here are Bezos, Boeing, and SpaceX.

There was Red Stone, Atlas, titan, Saturn I, Ib, and V. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. multiple contractors at each phase.

I understand, I wasn't arguing that there weren't multiple contractors, only pointing out that NASA had all of its resources making one system at a time. If we combined the space launch R&D budgets of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boeing into one pool and focused on one system, it might go faster.

Strongly disagree. If they were all combined, we would likely have the same level as any given Company’s progress, but no more due to the mythical man month factor.

Instead we have multiple moonshots, bringing diverse approaches, and constrained by a budget. Since we know from Apollo that “if money were no object”, we can do this, it’s a good approach.

The reason we never moved on from Apollo is because economics matter. We were able to beat the tyranny of the rocket equation; now we are seeing if we can do it for a much smaller amount. And we have multiple bets on different approaches.

You mean like NASA for the last 40 years?