It's not several orders of magnitude smaller. According to ChatGPT, SpaceX has spent $20-30B as of 2023, compared to $160-170B in 2023 dollars. That's less than one order of magnitude, and consider that SpaceX is starting with all the knowledge gained from Apollo, plus 50 years of technological progress.
To your second question, the better alternative is not to send a bunch of junk into space. Aside from low-orbit satellites, space is a waste of time and a distraction, and increasingly appears just to be a way to trick people into ignoring disastrous fiscal and monetary policies while enriching one person.
Don't cite ChatGPT, it's prone to confabulation. According to Wikipedia:
> At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.
That's far more than the roughly 13,000 SpaceX employees. Moreover, that's just Apollo, there were also related programs like Gemini. (The SpaceX employee number also includes people not working on the Starship program.)
> To your second question, the better alternative is not to send a bunch of junk into space. Aside from low-orbit satellites, space is a waste of time and a distraction, and increasingly appears just to be a way to trick people into ignoring disastrous fiscal and monetary policies while enriching one person.
To your second question, the better alternative is not to send a bunch of junk into space. Aside from low-orbit satellites, space is a waste of time and a distraction, and increasingly appears just to be a way to trick people into ignoring disastrous fiscal and monetary policies while enriching one person.