Is it though? I'm not knowledgeable on this at all, but it _seems_ like Space X is blowing up a lot more expensive equipment compared to NASA back in the space race days. Genuinely curious how it compares and how true my outsider impression is.
It's not as expensive as it looks, Starship plus booster costs around 100 million. A Saturn V Apollo mission cost 185 million in 1969 which, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Cost, would now be a bit less than a billion dollars.
Also, SpaceX is not building rockets, they are building a rocket factory. If they succeed they will have lowered the cost of putting stuff into space by an order of magnitude. The potential rewards are huge.
Yes but at this point the upper stage is barely a spaceship. Mostly an empty shell. And they have spent $10 billion so far on something that barely flies.
R&D and prototyping is an up-front expense. Amortization over many units spreads out the costs to long term profitability. Does SpaceX have that kind of time, though? A prospective global depression would dry up the capital for funding Starship development.
There's more of a production line when building Starships, with modern mechanised tooling - much of it computerised and 100% repeatable. There's been at least 10 so far, vs only 15 Saturn V, 3 of which were ground tested.
There's absolutely loads being done for the first time here. Not least of which: running this r&d off commercial contracts instead of directly off taxpayer money.
Apollo also invented, funded and productized a lot of modern embedded computing and computer manufacturing, to keep in our lane here. Obviously SpaceX has access to a very different tech environment that yes, Apollo helped push forward.
Manufacturing the Apollo Guidance Computer (which wasn't in the rocket per-se, but was wired up to it and could fly the rocket in certain scenarios) alone consumed around 40% of the US' entire IC production capacity at the time.
Whenever we talk about space flight, this movie quote comes to mind: "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder."
Starship has considerably fewer moving parts. And googling 'evolution of raptor engines' gives you some pretty stark images on how simpler things look, in principle.
