Programmers then:

No problem NASA mate, we can use these microcontrollers to bring men to the moon no problem!

Programmers now:

Help Stack Overflow, my program is kill.. isn't 90GB (looking at you Evolution) and 400GB of virtual memory (looking at you Gitea) for my app completely normal? I thought that unused memory was wasted memory!1!

(400GB in physical memory is something you only find in the most high-end servers btw)

Programmers then: peace of cake

Programmers now: How can I do this in JavaScript?

Programmers then: I will make this picture 300x200 pixels

Programmers now: My website layout breaks on iPhone in portrait mode. We gotta support internet explorer 8. Why we cant build our app in Hannah Montana linux? Oh, our gateway service cannot reach usercontex service, thats why we cant display users date of birth in account panel. Our servers cant handle more then 2million requests per minute, we gotta reimplement score calculation in golang. Are you guys writing your tests? We are down to 92% coverage. Also anyone having problems connecting mongodb? Well, try changing few parameters in deep belief network that we are working on.

Don't tell me HTML wasn't used in Appollo missions

NASA then:
"Here's an unlimited budget courtesy of the president and our government. Do science!"

NASA today:
"How cheaply can we get this done without killing anyone?

Sorry, that portion of the workshop has been leased to raytheon to build missiles. You'll need to tent part of your project in the parking lot.

We're backburnering that project because one of the evangelist legislators in charge of us doesn't like it.

Is there a way this work can be done by meth addicts, preferably in florida or texas?

We'd love to have better scientific drawing management, but the woman running that group loves php and has tenure. We can't change anything until she dies.

We understand the phone at your desk from 1970 is broken, but we won't have a new phone requisition until 2035 given budget shortfalls.

Delete all the environmental science data, per order of the president. Don't back it up on personal hard drives, don't pull the station wagon around back and definitely do not delete records of monitoring systems aboard critical satellites.

We need to go back to the moon bc reasons. Don't ask why. You've seen the news. I understand if any of you want to head out to the private sector."

@hack To be fair, the old programmers also had their fair share of issues to deal with.

Imagine you're developing a game for ye old Commodore 64's, PET's, and ZX Spectrums of the time. So you'll be drawing an image and run at a certain speed. Because there was no concept of drivers at the time, you'll need to support various sound cards like the Soundblaster, PC speakers, and any other sound cards you may want to support. Every game had to do it on its own. Now for graphics.. CGA, EGA or this newfangled VGA? Yep, gotta support all of those as well. How many colors can we have and which resolutions will that translate to? How fast will the CPU be that this game runs on? Back in the day the games synchronized themselves with the clock. If it's too fast, the game will run too fast. Gotta support all those clock frequencies as well.. Oh and connectors, RCA or RF?

The problems we have today aren't more difficult or complex. They're just different.

@SortOfTested To be fair, 60s space race was also politically more about the cold war than it was about scientific progress.

@bittersweet
Whatever the reason was, scientists had all the funding they wanted.

@SortOfTested I think that has always been the case, as long as your science is relevant for offensive of defensive capabilities, or the political stability of the nation.

In the 60s, going to the moon was the ultimate ICBM improvement program. Once ballistic missiles were perfected, spaceflight decreased -- until recently, because now information warfare is the new meme.

@bittersweet
Funding didn't take a sharp downturn until the early 00s, so that math doesn't really add up.

Space became a business, and likely everything business, it went to shit with bureaucracy and cost cutting.