There's a big difference from developing the FIRST rocket and developing A rocket. The first one is now built. We now have the people with the experience. It can (and is!) being done.
I'm not arguing the price of the first rockets that NASA built at all. I'm arguing that SpaceX didn't have an extra hundred billion of secret NSA black money that they used in addition to the publicly known about billion that we can be sure was spent.
You can't argue that because NASA spent $20B or whatever in 1960's dollars to get us to the moon that somehow SpaceX's $1B rocket is ACTUALLY a $21B rocket. You could argue that if SpaceX had to develop everything from scratch it would cost a lot more than $1B, but they didn't.
Similarly not everything that it would take to go to Mars is going to have to be engineered from scratch. Especially as launch prices keep coming down. If you could get to orbit for $100/lb it's only 10x as expensive as overnight air freight and at that point weight wouldn't even be a real issue anymore.
Is it kind-of crazy to talk about $100/lb launches right now? Yeah sure. But Musk has said that it's $200k worth of fuel to launch a Falcon 9, which has a 30klb payload to LEO. That's $6/lb in marginal cost plus whatever overhead on the rocket. Suddenly $100/lb doesn't look quite so batshit insane.
I'm not arguing the price of the first rockets that NASA built at all. I'm arguing that SpaceX didn't have an extra hundred billion of secret NSA black money that they used in addition to the publicly known about billion that we can be sure was spent.
You can't argue that because NASA spent $20B or whatever in 1960's dollars to get us to the moon that somehow SpaceX's $1B rocket is ACTUALLY a $21B rocket. You could argue that if SpaceX had to develop everything from scratch it would cost a lot more than $1B, but they didn't.
Similarly not everything that it would take to go to Mars is going to have to be engineered from scratch. Especially as launch prices keep coming down. If you could get to orbit for $100/lb it's only 10x as expensive as overnight air freight and at that point weight wouldn't even be a real issue anymore.
Is it kind-of crazy to talk about $100/lb launches right now? Yeah sure. But Musk has said that it's $200k worth of fuel to launch a Falcon 9, which has a 30klb payload to LEO. That's $6/lb in marginal cost plus whatever overhead on the rocket. Suddenly $100/lb doesn't look quite so batshit insane.