Reminder for the more casual space enjoyers, this explosion is pretty bad and sets back space development. BUT IT WAS WORSE DURING APOLLO YA'LL ARE NOSTALGIA PILLED
Apollo was:
- extremely high risk. No iterative testing, they literally wheel out a rocket for the first time and pray.
- PEOPLE ARENT DYING. There was an accepted risk of 1/50 launches going boom back in the 1960s. Turns out that was a lot closer to 1/20, we're significantly better now with unmanned testing.
- huge operational costs, Apollo had 400k people working on it and tons of gov overhead.
- overenginered as shit. They used pure hydrogen/oxygen fuel because of the theoretical thrust to weight ratio completely ignoring the costs of engines, engineering overhead, and sourcing said fuel. Current rockets are all moving away from this Apollo approach.
- literally zero reusability (space shuttle I love you but refurb costs were insane).
Apollo cost far more in lives, equipment, and money. It was still an impressive acheviement, but by no means are we living in some sort of shadow of our past glory