if you retire at 67
But you won’t.
By the time I’m 67, the retirement age will be 75, by the time I’m 75, the retirement age will be 80. The whole thing is a scam. The boomers get to enjoy retirement and they have us pay for it which is why they keep dangling that carrot in front of us, but realistically it will never happen for my generation or anyone after. Due to advances in medicine people get older and older, while costs keep rising. It’s simply not sustainable anymore to have that large a part of the population not working while simultaneously costing a lot of money in care.
It is a big success. NASA’s approach in the 60s was simply different than SpaceX’s approach, specifically because of reactions like yours. If you’re spending public money you better get it right the first time. What people fail to understand is that SpaceX’s iterative approach is much faster and cheaper than getting it right the first time.
The entire Saturn V program costs $52 billion dollars in today’s money, with each launch costing $1.4 billion. The Space Launch System, costs $32 billion in today’s money, development for the SLS began in 2021 and has only flown once. So far one launch every year and a half or so has been planned at a cost of $2 billion per launch.
Development cost for Starship is estimated at about $8 billion so far, with launches expected to cost about $100 million per launch initially (but that’s expected to go down in the future). You can launch 20 starships for each SLS or 14 for each Saturn V and that’s ignoring the up-front cost of developing it.