Apollo 1= 3 deaths?
Apollo 6 = 0 deaths?
two failed missions = ? deaths.
Not to mention, pretty much all of the technology used to fly the shuttles came from the early Apollo missions. There was not a lot of new basic technology (other than computing) that came about. Propulsion remained essentially the same.
Tons of new technology on the shuttle. Solid fuel boosters that were reusable, fly by wire control systems, ability to pinpoint controllable landing, reusable craft, some of the first large scale robotics (that big arm that comes out of the shuttle is basically a larger version of the robotic welders you see in car factories), our welding technology was light years ahead of the hand Tig welds they used on Saturn, composites used in manufacturing some of the secondary structural components, etc.
Working on the SLS we reuse everything we can from shuttle, Apollo, Delta, Thor, Titan, Atlas, etc for the real reason we haven't gone back to the moon, $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. But the stuff that we are using new is way beyond what we used on shuttle. Some of the ways we are manufacturing and the technology we are using is beyond what would be believable in the old days.
We are living today off of the GREAT strides made in technology during that period.
And they lived off great strides made by the Germans building the V2 who lived off the great strides of Goddard in the '20's. I get irked at work when people try to claim that the old engineers were infallible gods because they didn't use computers. A computer is a tool, we do the exact same calculations as the guys used to do with a slide rule, we can just do them faster. It's not Jarvis, I can't just tell my computer to calculate the accelerations from following a particular trajectory and go get a drink, I still have to put in the same equations that were essentially derived by Robert Goddard in the '20's that the guys were calculating by hand, now I just don't have to worry about forgetting to carry the one because I went and got a drink. And we can be more accurate about it, so we can build it lighter, faster, and more efficient.
Plus all the computing power that we are able to put us ahead of the curve of the old guys in other ways. In Saturn the testing budget was immense. That's why in the mid '60's NASA was eating up
nearly 4.5% of the total national budget. Think about that, Cold War, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, equal rights movement all happening in that same time frame and we were spending nearly 5% of the budget on NASA. Now we are using 0.5% of the national budget (of course the budget overall is larger now, in adjusted dollars we are getting 50% of what we got in '66). Partly because rather than running to the test stand every time we are not sure about what is going to happen I can do a Finite Element Analysis rather than destructive testing. I can do Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis rather than immediately running to the wind tunnel. I can build 3D computer models and build assemblies in CAD space rather than building a prototype.
Link for the budget numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASATL;DR. We are not dumber because we are using computers.
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