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The Apollo project launched the roughly comparable Saturn V rockets 13 times. None of the launched rockets exploded. None of the launched¹ missions led to any loss of life.
The Saturn V was made at a time when all the computing power on the planet put together was less than a middling-power smart phone of five years ago. The rockets and modules were controlled by computers that had less computing horsepower than an average USB charger. And it was more of an experimental rocket system than anything the Apartheid Manchild's company has put out thus far.
Space Karen's company has launched their pretentiously-named "Starship" system seven times. Four of them ended up exploding, and one of them broke up the launch pad so badly that it endangered life and limb and did damnable violence to a fragile ecosystem with endangered species.
And yet the fanbois trumpet the "success" of a mission that has not yet actually made it to LEO, has not done any of the things it was supposed to have had done in 2022 for NASA's Artemis mission and going back to the moon.
And this turd wants to send people to MARS!?
¹ Important word here. Re-read it before you "well akshuallee" me.
Wikipedia tells me the Saturn V development cost, in 2023 dollars, was about 50 billion. Starship, as of 2023, cost about five billion.
These are test flights. They are done to find problems. They will fail. It's a totally different approach to the Apollo program.
Saturn V was that expensive because the sheer volume of calculations that had to be done were done BY HUMAN BEINGS. Electronic computers weren't up to the task. Salaries were a huge expense item because computers (in the original sense of the word) liked to be paid.
SpaceX has the advantage of having computers literally four orders of magnitude more powerful in every one of their engineer's pockets. Plus computers far more powerful than those available at a very low price. Calculations that took thousands of person-days (daily!), with the commensurate salaries of the people doing them, are now done in seconds.
There is simply no excuse—beyond the toxic "move fast and break things" ethos of modern "tech"—for constantly having rockets blow up in this day and age. The simulations and static test analyses and such that were once such an expensive chore are orders (note the plural) of magnitude cheaper today than they were in the 1960s.
It's just incompetence and arrogance.
Also I note with interest that from inception (1962) to first full stack flight (which was also the first flight of any component) was only five years.
Starship was officially announced in 2012 and its first flight (of sorts, if you call "spinning out of control until it disassembled itself a "flight") was in 2023.
ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS and SpaceX still hadn't made a surviving launch. For reference, eleven years after the Saturn V was started, the Saturn V had made 13 flights, all successful, doing its final flight that year boosting Skylab into LEO. (You know, that place that SpaceX hasn't even yet put an empty Starship into.)
(P.S. Even at 50,000,000 dollars that's less than 1/8 of the Apartheid Manchild's net worth.)