Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.

This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.

> Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.

And it sent 3 people to the moon and brought them back with no refueling.

60 years ago.

Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.

An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.