The Finance of The Apollo Program
Boxes of Apollo budget reports at NASA’s historical reference collection in Washington, DC, is a bit of paper describing a “loose agenda” for a conference intriguingly titled Apollo Cost Consensus. The goals stated by the schedule are for “the cost estimating community to reach consensus on Apollo costs.”
Anyhow, the United States’ most famous triumph in human exploration — a triumph of cooperation, engineering, and organization — evades an answer to an obviously simple question: how much did the Apollo Program cost?
Curious Costs of Apollo Program
Though the convener is unknown, you can feel their withdrawal in the lettered notes summarizing the meeting: -“[it] had the predictable results…and no one was fully prepared to discuss the problem… the data extremely sketchy… lastly, discrepancies typically about 15% – 20%.”
Before-mentioned is the lament of the Apollo cost very curious. Anyhow, the United States’ most famous triumph in human exploration—a triumph of engineering, cooperation, and organization—avoids an answer to an apparently mere question: how much did Apollo Program really cost?
Total Costs of Apollo USD 25,4 Billion
In1973, NASA presented transcribed testimony to Congress detailing the total cost of Apollo as $25.4 billion. Furthermore, the data presented summarize, to one significant digit, major program lines, but does not declare spending by year or by individual programs. Yet, there are more specific cost data that say Apollo only cost $19.4 billion. And this is a notable difference lacking apparent answers.
How much money was spent on the Apollo Program? And when is very relevant as NASA has once again been directed to return to the lunar surface. Project Artemis outperforms both the ambitions and ambitions of the Apollo Program by its goals to put a man on the Moon in four years and then to establish a permanent human presence at the Moon.
To properly evaluate Artemis’ seriousness, it makes sense to compare its spending plans to the one data point we have for a triumphant human Moon mission, Apollo.
So, how much money did it take to do it the first time? How was the money spent? And, perhaps most importantly, when did the funds show up?
The members of the meeting appeared to share this motivation for knowing the cost and phasing of the Apollo Program, mainly because of efficient cost estimation and financial planning.
So, despite the unsatisfactory outcome of the conference itself, it appears that the members agreed to revisit initial cost data in congressional budget narratives from the 1960s and to examine the record collections at Marshall Space Flight Center and Johnson Space Center and. Whether this happened, there is no evidence.
Using the lead from the unknown notetaker in NASA’s financial office, we reconstructed the Apollo Program’s entire recorded cost history utilizing publicly reported congressional budget accounts from fiscal year (F.Y.) 1961 to 1974.
Can We Answer, How Much and When?
Furthermore, we also used NASA’s historical reference collection and identified additional Apollo Program cost documentation developed by NASA’s financial office, including a unique breakdown of annual operations and construction numbers.
We can now try to answer “how much and when?” when talking about the Apollo Program, and maybe resolve some of the discrepancies mentioned above.
According to the reconstruction (See table 1 below), direct R&D commitments for the Apollo Program were $20.6 billion within the financial years 1960 and 1973. Also, they are attaching “indirect” costs, such as the building of facilities, operations, and deployment of the data, and tracking network results in a $25.8 billion total cost for The Apollo Project. And this coincides with the congressionally published number within 1.6 percent and depicts a notable improvement over the cost data presented elsewhere.
| FY | Apollo Total | Spacecraft | Saturn Launch Vehicles | Dev, Support, & Operations | Construction of Facilities | Facilities Operations and Overhead | Tracking and Data R&D |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | $57,420 | $0 | $57,320 | $100 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| 1961 | $299,228 | $0 | $174,531 | $297 | $53,400 | $71,000 | $0 |
| 1962 | $880,971 | $82,522 | $385,504 | $27,545 | $252,400 | $133,000 | $0 |
| 1963 | $2,001,035 | $363,962 | $757,976 | $136,497 | $560,600 | $182,000 | $0 |
| 1964 | $3,172,838 | $876,575 | $1,263,276 | $139,687 | $637,700 | $219,000 | $36,600 |
| 1965 | $3,197,219 | $1,009,898 | $1,434,179 | $170,542 | $215,100 | $268,000 | $99,500 |
| 1966 | $3,334,185 | $1,201,466 | $1,542,857 | $196,662 | $29,200 | $297,000 | $67,000 |
| 1967 | $3,375,300 | $1,275,001 | $1,373,580 | $274,019 | $44,700 | $316,000 | $92,000 |
| 1968 | $3,005,430 | $1,034,700 | $975,565 | $545,765 | $21,400 | $315,000 | $113,000 |
| 1969 | $2,454,000 | $913,127 | $577,986 | $533,887 | $0 | $302,000 | $127,000 |
| 1970 | $1,933,737 | $778,978 | $486,691 | $422,068 | $0 | $124,000 | $122,000 |
| 1971 | $1,112,169 | $398,147 | $189,059 | $314,963 | $0 | $104,000 | $106,000 |
| 1972 | $775,328 | $120,006 | $157,996 | $310,326 | $0 | $90,000 | $97,000 |
| 1973 | $180,000 | $56,700 | $26,300 | $0 | $0 | $41,000 | $56,000 |
| Totals | $25,778,860 | $8,111,082 | $9,402,820 | $3,072,358 | $1,814,500 | $2,462,000 | $916,100 |
Summary of The Lunar Effort
The entire Moon effort (including robotic missions and Gemini added) would cost $288 billion in today’s dollars.
The small difference is due to uncertainties in the exact costs of Saturn V rocket launch vehicles in the early 1960s. It’s possible that NASA excluded initial Saturn V construction costs when presenting its report to Congress, as they precluded Apollo’s start. It is, however, as well as the DoD portion of the Saturn I obligations in the Fiscal year 1960. This arrangement helps to better answer the question of “what did the Moon landing cost?” as opposed to “what did NASA pay?” Overall, this data set agrees well with the values stated to Congress.
Because no accounting effort is entirely objective, we tried to note every individual decision we made in what to count, when, and also where via per-cell comments in the Excel spreadsheet above.
How Much Would NASA Be Spending On The Apollo Program Today?
Now we have yearly spending data for the Apollo Program, we are in a more favorable position to present accurate adjustments for inflation, as inflation rates varied substantially year-to-year during the 1960s. Here we use two methods to correct for inflation, both of which answer a somewhat different question:
(NNSI) or NASA’s New Start Index is explicitly invented to normalize the expenses of aerospace projects over time by fully weighting the changing costs of laborers and aerospace materials. Furthermore, this modification answers the question, “How much would NASA be spending on the Apollo Program today?”
The Apollo Program spending as a relative share of the nation’s (GDP) or Gross Domestic Product. This modification answers, “If the United States were to designate resources to a space project to the same size as it did for the Moon effort, how much would NASA be spending these days?”
Apollo Spending as a Relative Share of The Nation’s GDP.
| Original $ Adjusted 2019 $ Relative GDP $ | |||
| Spacecraft 8.1 billion 81.3 billion 194.8 billion | |||
| Launch Vehicles 9.4 billion 99.0 billion 243.4 billion | |||
| Development & Operations 3.1 billion 28.7 billion 66.9 billion | |||
| Direct costs 20.6 billion 209.0 billion 505.2 billion | |||
| Construction of Facilities, Salaries, & Overhead 5.2 billion 54.8 billion 136.2 billion | |||
| Total Apollo 25.8 billion 263.8 billion 641.4 billion | |||
| Robotic Lunar Program 907.0 million 10.3 billion 26.1 billion | |||
| Project Gemini 1.3 billion 14.1 billion 34.8 billion | |||
| Total Lunar Effort 28.0 billion 288.1 billion 702.3 billion |
To summarize, the entire Moon effort, including robotic missions and Gemini, would cost $288 billion in today’s dollars. If the United States prioritized the project financially, in a similar way, they did back in the 1960s. The US would have to spend $702 billion to occupy an equal share of GDP.
What Kind of Expenses Should We Consider As Part of The Apollo Program?
Table 2 above asks a crucial question: What do we include in the Apollo Lunar program?
During the 1960s and 1970s, NASA’s budget was in three primary accounts: Construction of Facilities (CoF), Administrative Operations (A.O.)—later renamed Research & Program Management (R&PM), and Research & Development (R&D).
Approximately all of the detailed cost data we have for the Apollo Program comes from the Research & Development accounts, which paid for obvious things like the production and development of the Saturn V launch vehicle, Apollo spacecraft, mission operations, and finally project integration. These are “direct costs.” Those data are why we frequently see the cost of the Apollo Program reported as $20 billion.
“Indirect costs” should be included, nevertheless, as they were used to build Apollo Program’s enabling infrastructure at what is now known as Kennedy Space Center, Michoud Assembly Facility, Stennis Space Center, and Johnson Space Center. Without those buildings and their attendant personnel, Apollo certainly would not have happened. These data are harder to understand from congressional budget justifications. Alternatively, we will rely on two internal reports developed for Congress from NASA’s financial office, which breaks down overhead costs and facilities from F.Y. 1961–1973.
The sum of the indirect and direct costs results in the $25.8 billion figure that nearly matches the total cost provided to Congress in 1973. Nevertheless, We will argue that this undercounts the total U.S. investment in the Apollo Program, as other attempts were pursued in service of the Moon goal during the 1960s. Gemini refined rendezvous and operations in low Earth orbit in service of the Apollo Program.
The Apollo Program Account
Furthermore, the robotic lunar programs during the 1960s also mapped the Moon’s surface and gave crucial ground truth in advance for future astronauts. And because they weren’t included in the “Apollo Program account” in NASA’s records doesn’t mean the money wasn’t used. These are the two most extensive programs (together they were approximately $24 billion in today’s dollars) relevant to the lunar effort but infrequently included in the total cost. In this article, we elect to incorporate them as “related programs” and add them to the total cost when we are speaking of the lunar effort.
The circumstances for contemporary human spaceflight programs and Artemis NASA’s human research development efforts have remained steady over the past decade. Yet, both the Space Launch System and the Orion crew capsule programs soldiered on notwithstanding the Moon, Mars, and asteroid’s destination changes.
With this new Apollo Program costing data, we can now correctly assess spending among Apollo and today’s comparable programs. Below we examine spending between SLS and the Saturn V and between the Orion crew capsule and the Command module. Why haven’t Orion or SLS has flown yet after years of development? The results below speak for themselves:
NASA’s overall budgets are themselves comparatively paltry related to the Apollo Program-era.
Corrected for inflation and normalizing to the same development start dates as their modern equivalents, the Saturn V rocket project cost NASA about $60 billion by this point in its evolution, related to 17.5 billion for the Space Launch System.
Spendings on Orion, assuming a generous start date of F.Y. 2008, totals $16.6 billion in relation to $39 billion spent on the CSM by this point even though the Command & Service Module program had effectively ended by this point! Compared to the Apollo Program, the expenses of NASA’s current human space exploration projects are relatively small. That said, NASA’s overall budgets are themselves comparatively paltry related to the Apollo Program-era.
Project Artemis And Its 2024 Moon Landing Goal.
Furthermore, while there are new ways of doing business in space today related to the Apollo Program-era, this fresh look at old data should tell us that crewed lunar exploration is very complicated and costly.
Furthermore, Project Artemis and its 2024 lunar landing goal, the most striking comparison, is the lunar lander. NASA must develop, fly, and test, a new lunar lander in the next five years. And while the White House has not presented a full budget run-out for this period, the supplemental budget application released in May of 2019 did offer $1 billion to begin the lunar lander development work in F.Y. 2020.
And as a comparison, through its first full fiscal year of development, the Apollo Program-era Lunar Module sustained $1.6 billion in adjusted dollars. Furthermore, spending climaxed three years later at $5.4 billion. The entire project cost, excluding the navigation and guidance computers, for the Lunar Module, was around 23.4 billion in today’s dollars. If the White House is earnest about landing on the lunar surface in 2024, we should expect significant growth in this project.
So, while there are new ways of doing business in space today related to the Apollo Program-era, this fresh look at old data should tell us that crewed lunar journeys are very complex and costly. The benefits of business entities in space exploration are uncertain. We can see few reasons to believe that commercial partners can present better capability for fractional amounts of the cost of past successful lunar programs.
Summary
Studying old data in new ways gives helpful meaning for evaluating the gravity of national space commitments. Complete Apollo budgetary data enables us to compare the total program costs and how quickly budgets grew when the money showed up and how it was divided up for the various major program. Given the hard demands of orbital astronaut and mechanics safety, we can better grasp current human spaceflight commitments by making direct correlations, program by program, and using old data.
Furthermore, to replicate the successes of past Moon endeavors, we have to understand that the Apollo Program. It was not just a victory of daring, engineering, and organization, but also as a triumph of political agreement that granted the money to reach the goal of putting a man on the Moon and returning him safely back to the Earth.
Don’t miss this historic takeoff on Saturday, May 30 at 3:22 p.m. EDT. SpaceX intends to fly its first astronauts into orbit since Elon Musk founded the company.
The 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to land the first man on the Moon will take place this summer 2020.