We know how much the Apollo program cost:
The United States spent \$28 billion to land men on the Moon between 1960 and 1973, or approximately \$288 billion when adjusted for inflation.
While landing on the moon has great intrinsic difficulty, it seems like much of the cost was from meeting the end-of-decade deadline. Some possible reasons (from this NASA article):
- In 1961 we had not even started Gemini, which demonstrably overran its budget significantly: "[...] difficulties shot an estimated \$350 million program to over \$1 billion. The overruns were successfully justified by the space agency, however, as necessities to meet the Apollo landing commitment."
- The S-II stage "was always behind schedule, and required constant attention and additional funding to ensure completion by the deadline for a lunar landing."
- "[t]he original NASA estimates had given a target date of 1967, but as the project became more crystallized agency leaders recommended not committing to such a strict deadline." If 1967 was possibly not achievable at a reasonable cost, then maybe even 1969 was a stretch.
However, it's also conceivable to me that Apollo would have cost more with an extended deadline--much of the work was parallelizable anyway, and a lack of urgency could have led to bureaucratic waste or higher safety demands.
So my questions are:
- Could the cost of the Apollo program have been cut down if NASA had, say, a 1979 deadline rather than 1969, and by how much?
- How would the later deadline affect individual segments of the cost-- background research, construction of facilities, development of the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft itself, and operations cost?
