And how long did it take the Saturn V to reach the launch pad? I’m talking about from inception to the launch of Apollo 4.
The question is, what percentage of the budget was NASA given in 1960s dollars to launch Apollo? Try north of 10%.
Presently, NASA is on a fixed 0.5% portion of the Federal budget.
Lots of other misinformation in that article.
The program was announced in 1962 and the first flight was in 1967. So, about 5 years.
But that was with self-trained Germans running the program. It takes longer if you use American college trained boys.
Development of the F1 engines was begun in 1955 for a DoD requirement (deliver the Ed Teller H-bomb design to targets in Asia), picked up by NACA/NASA, and first test-fired in 1959 (4 years), cavitation problems were solved by 1961, in time for JFK in his frustration with apparent Soviet space leadership to set the US the goal of a man on the Moon. The first operational engine was delivered in 1963. The Saturn V first launched late in 1967. The F1 engines never had a failure through its last flight in 1973. [summary available on wikiped']