Apollo Program - Program Cost

Program Cost

When President Kennedy first chartered the Moon landing program, a preliminary cost estimate of $7 billion was generated, but this proved an extremely unrealistic guess of what could not possibly be determined precisely, and James Webb used his administrator's judgment to change the estimate to $20 billion before giving it to Vice President Johnson.

Webb's estimate shocked many at the time (including the President), but ultimately proved to be reasonably accurate. In January 1969, NASA prepared an itemized estimate of the run-out cost of the Apollo program. The total came to $23.9 billion, itemized as follows:

• Apollo spacecraft: $7,945.0 million
• Saturn I launch vehicles: $767.1 million
• Saturn IB launch vehicles: $1,131.2 million
• Saturn V launch vehicles: $6,871.1 million
• Launch vehicle engine development: $854.2 million
• Mission support: $1,432.3 million
• Tracking and data acquisition: $664.1 million
• Ground facilities: $1,830.3 million
• Operation of installations: $2,420.6 million.

The final cost of project Apollo was reported to Congress as $25.4 billion in 1973. It took up the majority of NASA's budget while it was being developed. For example, in 1966 it accounted for about 60 percent of NASA's total $5.2 billion budget. A single Saturn V launch in 1969 cost up to $375 million, compared to the National Science Foundation's fiscal year 1970 budget of $440 million.

In 2009, NASA held a symposium on project costs which presented an estimate of the Apollo program costs in 2005 dollars as roughly $170 billion. This included all research and development costs; the procurement of 15 Saturn V rockets, 16 Command/Service Modules, 12 Lunar Modules, plus program support and management costs; construction expenses for facilities and their upgrading, and costs for flight operations. This was based on a Congressional Budget Office report, A Budgetary Analysis of NASA’s New Vision for Space, September 2004. The Space Review estimated in 2010 the cost of Apollo from 1959 to 1973 as $20.4 billion, or $109 billion in 2010 dollars, averaged over the six landings as $18 billion each.