Apollo space program cost

Had the president not been shot, "my judgment is that, indeed, he would not have turned off the clock and that he would have continued to support the program," Logsdon said. But if it wasn't, I think he would have moved ahead.

And I think that Both programs underwent extensive modifications, driving up costs, as program goals changed between the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. As it now stands, an initial unpiloted SLS test flight is planned for late next year or, more likely, with the first piloted flight of an Orion capsule expected in the timeframe. The first Artemis moon landing, using the third SLS booster and a yet-to-be designed lander, is planned for Looking forward, we should expect significant increases in spending associated with an accelerated lunar effort or adjust our expectations accordingly.

Bill Harwood has been covering the U. He covered space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. Are Americans ready to go back to the moon? William Harwood. I find it difficult to argue against the comparatively low Apollo Program cost, especially when looking at other significant expenditures taken on by the U.

The US is working with private industry to create efficient ways to send astronauts to space and beyond. Both amounts are unadjusted for inflation. Thanks for identifying the confusing phrasing. Oh god.. Its been two years and no one has commented this atrocity misuse of grammar.

My OCD is not going to take it anymore! There was a study done by the OMB or CBO in the s I think that evaluated the returns to our economy from Project Apollo indicating that we received somewhere between four and seven dollars for every dollar spent in the form of new technologies, new scientific discoveries, new materials science, manufacturing and management paradigms for doing large projects, electronics, and medical imagining CAT scans and NMRIs , etc.

I have heard of this study for many years, but can anyone provide a link to it? I would like to use it to refute those who say Project Apollo was a waste. It is true that, for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U. Space exploration can also serve as a stimulus for children to enter the fields of science and engineering. And where are these technologies and achievements, if now are forced to buy rocket engines from Russia and fly to the ISS in a Russian vehicle?

They inflated just a monetary bubble, included a mechanism of permanent inflation, which a burden on the economies of those countries that began to believe that the US is the most advanced country in all respects, with developed science, industry and technology.

There really was no landing, it was not needed. But all this is not important, the main thing is money! Is not it? Jerry Pournelle reported that during the same time as Apollo, the US spent as much on cosmetics, and New York among large states, spent more on liquor. Robert Zubrin in late 90s reported that we spend more on each; fast food, illegal drugs, and lotteries, than on NASA.

He showed that in terms of fraction of the total or discretionary budget, NASA is getting only fractionally less than during Apollo, while doing much less development of new capability. Not including black budget or ongoing operational costs in our continual war, each of which is more.

Very good reading, and important insight. Close Menu Home. Were the Moon Missions really a worthwhile endeavor? Contents hide. Apollo Program The cost to return to the moon. Interest on U. This agrees with the congressionally reported number within 1. The relative value of the U. In , the cost of a loaf of bread, an hour of a construction worker's time, or pound of aluminum was generally lower, than the same items today. This doesn't necessarily mean that those were cheaper in Paying 50 cents for a loaf of bread sounds cheap, but it occupied a larger share of household expenditures 0.

Good inflation adjustments attempt to account for such subtleties. Inflation adjustment is far from an exact science. The makeup of the U. For these reasons, all adjustments for inflation should be considered as more of a guideline than a cut and dry assertion of absolute worth for an in-depth exploration of this subject, I recommend the essay "Defining Measures of Worth: Most are better than the CPI".

Another subtle but important point: spending on Apollo spanned 14 years between and , and annual inflation rates varied substantially throughout this period.

Absent year-to-year data, you have to squash down all Apollo spending into a single year and adjust for inflation from there, functionally ignoring the fact that inflation values in were different than those in This new dataset greatly improves the inflation-adjustment calculation by enabling refined year-by-year adjustments for inflation.

I believe this is a far better method for inflation-adjustment for Apollo than using the Consumer Price Index CPI , which is designed for household and consumer goods, not moonshots. The second method is to adjust the costs so that they occupy the same relative share of the nation's economy, or Gross Domestic Product GDP , over time.

This approach answers the question: "If the U. If the U. Since no accounting effort is wholly objective, I attempted to note every subjective decision I made regarding what to count, when, and where, via per-cell comments in the Excel spreadsheet version of the source data.

I took a generous interpretation of Apollo-related costs: if it fed into the lunar effort, or was likely to, I included it as part of Apollo.

This occasionally means that there are small discrepancies between my annual project sums and those reported by NASA mine tend to be slightly larger. I also included spending on the Saturn project pre-dating the actual start of Project Apollo, as those were used primarily for the lunar effort. I also attempted to normalize costs across accounts in the summary tables of the source data. NASA's accountants frequently changed their internal accounting practices for Apollo, making it otherwise hard to compare spending year-to-year.

For example, in the very early s, the costs of the Saturn rocket engine development were grouped with the costs of Saturn rocket engine procurement. In later years, procurement costs for the engines were included with the direct costs of the rocket, and development was considered separately. I account for this in my summary tables, and further acknowledgments of these sorts of minutiae are included in the Excel spreadsheet.

Indirect costs should not be discounted, however. These include the costs to build Apollo's enabling infrastructure, including the space centers currently known as Johnson, Kennedy, and Stennis.