NASA in the 1960s ate almost half per cent of the entire US GDP. (The Manhattan project was even more expensive: see https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf).

Today, that would correspond to more than 100 billion USD a year.

SpaceX has nowhere that kind of money. They are orders of magnitude smaller, and must comply with regulations that Apollo didn't have to.

Of course Usain Bolt will overtake a well trained mouse.

I don't know where are you from, but over here landing an orbital rocket booster on its ass is pretty impressive. Something NASA didn't even bother enough to try to achieve.

I think the previous commenter was refering to the NASA of the 1960s, which returned a human from the surface of the moon before Elon Musk was born. SpaceX has more than a few kilobytes of RAM and can't really be compared to the immense achievement of the cold-war space programs.

It depends how you balance it out.

SpaceX is doing things that current nation states can't/won't do and do it on a comparative shoestring.

Yes NASA did amazing things (as did Roscosmos) with the technology they had but they had much more resources as well.

If SpaceX continues on it's current trajectory I wouldn't bet on a return to the moon and back inside a decade or so.

Also if you adjust for $/kg to LEO (and eventually Lunar orbit) then SpaceX is crushing NASA.

It's all about what metric you pick (or cherry pick if you are trying to make a point) really.

NASA is amazing, one of my favourite organisations ever back to been a kid in the 80's watching the Shuttle launches and some of the stuff they've done on pure science is amazing.

Let NASA do the pure science (which realistically has to be publicly funded) and SpaceX (and it's private competitors (when they get some..)) focus on that "$/kg to space" - we win both ways.

Also for Clarity, I'm not an Elon Musk fan, I think he's a bit of a prick.

I respect the outcomes/people who work for the companies not the man.

At the peak of the Apollo era NASA was 4.41% of US Gov spending.

For 2020 that would equate to about 264 billion dollars.

SpaceX isn't spending 264 billion dollars a year and look what they are doing!.

NASA of the 1960s was consuming 10% of America's GDP. You can do a lot with that kind of money. SpaceX does its part on a Snapchat budget.

Not even close to true.

US GDP in 1965 was $743.7 billion[0].

NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending. The agency was building up to the first Moon landing and the Apollo program was a top national priority, consuming more than half of NASA's budget and driving NASA's workforce to more than 34,000 employees and 375,000 contractors from industry and academia.

$5 billion is 0.67% of $743.7 billion.

[0] https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=1965

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

OK I checked. NASA budget in 1965 was indeed just 60 billion, which is like only 8% of not even GDP but U.S. federal budget. Chump change, shame on you SpaceX for not landing on the Moon yet.

a VTOL rocket booster, no, but NASA has had experience with VTOL rockets. Despite their marking, SpaceX did not invent VTOL rockets.

NASA has never launched a orbital velocity VTOL rocket

no, but the Delta Clipper test flights in the 90s were the first time a rocket had landed vertically on Earth.

Half a decade? Or half a century?