Artemis has a budget of over 90 billion dollars, it's more than 4 billion for that Artemis II launch (as estimated by NASA, possibly more because they don't even know exactly how much they're spending). For that price one might reasonably expect a couple of quality cameras for the public to be able to view what their money was spent on. For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!

NASA had their budget cut, but when you look more into it a lot of that never went into spaceflight to begin with.

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meatloaf_man 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

>For comparison, a SpaceX ISS resupply mission costs NASA ~$150 million. While that's a very different rocket and mission, that still doesn't account for a 26x higher price!

With what authority do you say this? Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??

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trompetenaccoun 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Apollo 11 (which included actually landing on the Moon for the first time in human history!) cost only $355 million* in 1969. That's a little over 3 billion in 2025 dollars. How has a comperatively "simple" flyby become so expensive?

You could also look at the same ISS mission with another contractor: Boeing got paid twice as much and then failed to bring the astronauts back in Starliner. So obviously NASA is overpaying some contractors, but that's probably only part of the story of where all that money is going. For 90 billion NASA would have delivered multiple Moon landings in the 70s - with inferior tech at that, and having to figure it all out for the first time. Don't underestimate how difficult it was.

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596462...

	▲	Neywiny 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You should compare against Apollo 9, which was 96% as expensive as 11 and much closer in mission profile. Then you don't need to worry about comparisons on simple flyby vs full landing

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themafia 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Do you have any idea how much closer the ISS is than the moon??

Distance isn't the factor. Useful payload to destination and required Delta V are. Leaving earth is 10 km/s. TLI is 4 km/s.

	▲	gus_massa a day ago \| parent [-]
		Obligatory link to old reddit graphic https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/ekgm2g/i_made_a_delt... It does not have the ISS, but IIUC it's slightly over "Low Earth Orbit". (I'd love to see one where the distances are draw proportional to Delta V.)

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gorgoiler a day ago | parent | prev [-]

From what I have heard, the standard rebuttal to NASA expense is that they are ploughing money into the ground to grow new things the hard way.

The goal isn’t to do things we can already do the way we know how to do them, it’s to do things we can’t do in ways we don’t yet have by training new people who don’t yet know how to do it. The opportunity being seized is that the investment will pay off with a leap forward to bigger and better things.

NASA is the Idris to SpaceX’s Python, the free jazz to their K-pop, the Cyberdeck to their MacBook, or — to go back to my original analogy — the locust-based flour to their 1000 hectares of wheat. This isn’t a value judgment. Pushing boundaries and knuckling down on commercial success are both worthy endeavors.

	▲	Rover222 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I mean that sounds nice, but the SLS rocket and Orion capsule are nothing new, they’re already outdated. But yeah NASA is great at many things. Issacman is smart enough to know they don’t need to be in the launch busnieee anymore.