That's the total cost over the decade+ the program was in existence. Divide by 10 and it becomes roughly 10% of Google's revenue.

So it wouldn't be insubstantial, but they could fund a similar effort if they really wanted to. Shareholders would have a thing or two to say about that though, which is why Elon Musk is keeping SpaceX private.

At the peak of Apollo program spending in 1966, Dreier says, NASA accounted for roughly 4.4% of the federal budget — 6.6% of discretionary spending — more than the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-how-much...

as a percentage of the yearly federal budget, it's not that extreme.

I believe the DoD budget (entirely non-NASA) is presently running around 700 billion a year.

some very quick searching tells me the total federal budget is something like 3500 billion a year. 4.4% of that would be 154bn a year.

I think SpaceX could put a man on the moon for much less? We’re currently at a few billion to put a whole horde of them on Mars I believe.

I don’t think anyone was alleging that google should be literally landing people on the moon, so invoking the economics of moon landings specifically is hardly relevant.

> The internet says: "The Apollo program's total cost was about $25.4 billion, about $152 billion in today's dollars."

And SpaceX will soon have the capability to do it with zillion times less. Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can.

A public funding source can provide that kind of support for a decade, but even for the likes of Google that's a stretch.

I prefer to think of a moonshot as longer than a longshot, whatever that might be worth.

It sure is sad though, coming from the acquisition before Google X that had just so many great players throughout.

Well if we're nitpicking, that was the payload, not the Saturn V booster...

But unfortunate though that was, it didn't represent a fundamental uncertainty in the achievability of the goal - simply a fatal engineering mistake, which was immediately rectified.

I'm sure the N-1 would have worked as well, if the project had been funded (in both time and money) properly. The Soviet failure to reach the moon was a project management failure, rather than the failure of a blind risk to pay off.