It would also cost $45 billion dollars in todays dollars, one time use. If you would have told the Sat5 engineers to "also make it reusable" they'd have asked for a trillion dollars, or more correctly told you "We can't do that at this time".
To be fair the capsule caught fire in a ground test once with three lives lost (Apollo 1) and the command module had an explosion in space once (Apollo 13) with no loss of life but it was a close thing.
I do agree with your larger point though. SpaceX just feels so much less impressive then previous major rockets, and that's only reinforced when they try and celebrate minor milestones like its supposed to be the greatest achievement ever. As if they want a cookie. Blue Origin has the same issue where they want acknowledgement for minor progress. Its only slightly less annoying because they make less of a deal about it, but this problem permeates the new space race/billionaire toys parade.
> SpaceX just feels so much less impressive then previous major rockets
That's a you problem.
> and that's only reinforced when they try and celebrate minor milestones like its supposed to be the greatest achievement ever
Again that's a you problem.
And if they are 'minor' is very much up for interpretation.
> Blue Origin has the same issue where they want acknowledgement for minor progress.
You are seriously comparing a company that has launched nothing to orbit with the company that has launch more to orbit then anybody else, including the largest object ever.
On what metric is this a "minor milestone"? They just successfully hoisted the largest rocket ever made into orbit, and unlike the Saturn V this will be fully reusable.
I wasn't yet alive during the Apollo launches, so I can't directly compare, but I for one feel these launches (today's included) are extremely impressive and am very happy to celebrate the "minor" milestones with them.
