And money is the only cost that matters, right? Let’s not be concerned about the material waste involved in the launch or the pollution that’s building up in outer space with each failure.

This kind of business oriented mindset is why Boeing planes are falling out of the sky and dropping their bolts.

Also the cost being cited for those early space programs involved an immense amount of breakthrough R&D which the newer programs ought to be benefiting from; there’s no reason to believe that a government program doing the same work as these private companies today would cost as much as they did in the early days. It’s not even a meaningful quantitative comparison in the first place.