Not the OP, but instead of "bombing Moscow", try "designing and building a reusable space rocket". A similar task, but much nobler intentions.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.
You also have to keep in mind that SpaceX pulled this off 40 years after NASA created the Space Shuttle. I'm not sure if that invalidates the example per se, but it seems a little like giving Apple credit for inventing the modern GUI, when they basically took it from Xerox PARC.
Original creators definitely need credit, but in my opinion, they are not the only ones who should be adequately respected.
Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.
In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.
To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.
Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.
But a great example of the difference between academia and private industry. The shuttle was reusable in theory, but required $1.5B in refurbishment between flights. Refurbishment of the boosters cost more than simply buying new ones would have.
Sure, and the Falcon rocket is not fully reusable, either. It's a lot harder to reuse the second stage, because it's the part that goes to orbit, which means it's moving very fast, and has to lose a lot of energy in order to land softly.
Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.
Saturn V was a huge feat, but Apollo program consumed about 2 per cent of American GDP in 1965.
This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.
Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.