human overhead

In article , ZZBunker wrote:

The reality is if you offered sufficient money to build
a launcher of equivalent capacity you'd get it but it
would be unlikely to use the 40 year old technology
of a Saturn V

And, it would cost 20 times as much as the original.

If your Saturn V cost twenty times as much now as it did then, and
assuming we've already factored inflation, it'd cost (at a guess)
comfortably in excess of the annual launch market. You may need to
revise those estimates a little; double, maybe triple, for something in
the S-V throw weight is plausible, if a reasonably steady market exists,
but not ten times that...

Hence NASA has lost the ability to build a Saturn V.

NASA lost the ability to buy them, not to build them - Boeing, North
American and (I think) Douglas gave up the ability to build them for the
somewhat sensible reason that there wasn't much point in it.

NASA could not get a Saturn V today; if it had several years leadtime,
it could have something reasonably equivalent. There's nothing "lost"
about the technology, just ended...

--
-Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray wrote:
NASA could not get a Saturn V today; if it had several years leadtime,
it could have something reasonably equivalent. There's nothing "lost"
about the technology, just ended...

However, when you consider that since the Apollo missions, NASA has
established strict "man rated" standards, wouldn't any ship built today with a
requirement to meet those standard cost orders of magnitudes more than Apollo
costed (even in adjusted dollars) ?