Costing out the Apollo Program

Any have the formula for translating apllo era budgets and expenses into now
dollars. I've been trying to get a feel for what Project Apollo would cost
in today's degraded currency.

"GMW" wrote in
:

Any have the formula for translating apllo era budgets and expenses
into now dollars. I've been trying to get a feel for what Project
Apollo would cost in today's degraded currency.

Using a single formula is trouble, since Apollo spanned multiple years and
there were different rates of inflation in each year. The best way is to
adjust the annual current-year budget to constant-year dollars using the
GDP price indices published with the federal budget each year.

Here's what I get using the current indices:

Fiscal GDP Apollo Budget
Year Price Current FY2004
Index ($M) ($M)
====== ====== ======== =========
1962 0.2154 $75.6 $376.4
1963 0.2181 $1,184.0 $5,821.7
1964 0.2207 $2,273.0 $11,044.7
1965 0.2245 $2,614.6 $12,489.5
1966 0.2293 $2,992.2 $13,994.0
1967 0.2367 $3,002.6 $13,603.7
1968 0.2451 $2,556.3 $11,184.7
1969 0.2563 $2,025.0 $8,472.9
1970 0.2703 $1,684.4 $6,682.8
1971 0.2838 $913.7 $3,452.6
1972 0.2972 $601.2 $2,169.3
1973 0.3103 $56.7 $196.0
2004 1.0724
========= =========
Totals $19,979.3 $89,488.4

The figure in current-year dollars, a little less than $20 billion, is at
odds with the commonly published figure of $24 billion. There was a small
amount of Apollo spending prior to FY62, but I doubt it was enough to
account for this. I suspect that the $24 billion either included
Skylab/ASTP, or was corrected to constant-year 1972 dollars (I come up with
$24.8 billion, which is close enough).

Anyway, if you assume the latter and assume pre-FY62 spending was
negligible, the cost of Apollo in today's (FY2004) currency is the lower-
right figure, almost $90 billion.

Sources:
Apollo/Saturn Costs, 1962-1973
Jenkins, Dennis R. Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space
Transportation System/The First 100 Flights, 3rd ed, p. 256

GDP (Chained) Price Indices
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget...s/hist10z1.xls

--
JRF

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Jorge R. Frank wrote:

The figure in current-year dollars, a little less than $20 billion, is at
odds with the commonly published figure of $24 billion. There was a small
amount of Apollo spending prior to FY62, but I doubt it was enough to
account for this. I suspect that the $24 billion either included
Skylab/ASTP, or was corrected to constant-year 1972 dollars (I come up with
$24.8 billion, which is close enough).

In the rtevised edition of "Appointment on the Moon" by Richard S.
Lewis (Ballantine, 1969), Lewis mentions the $24 billion dollar price;
a footnote gives the source as "Report to the U.S. House of
Representatives'
Committee on Science and Astronautics by George Mueller, Associate
Administrator for Manned Space Flight, NASA, March 1969."

--Bill Thompson

"William R. Thompson" wrote in
:

Jorge R. Frank wrote:

The figure in current-year dollars, a little less than $20 billion,
is at odds with the commonly published figure of $24 billion. There
was a small amount of Apollo spending prior to FY62, but I doubt it
was enough to account for this. I suspect that the $24 billion either
included Skylab/ASTP, or was corrected to constant-year 1972 dollars
(I come up with $24.8 billion, which is close enough).

In the rtevised edition of "Appointment on the Moon" by Richard S.
Lewis (Ballantine, 1969), Lewis mentions the $24 billion dollar price;
a footnote gives the source as "Report to the U.S. House of
Representatives'
Committee on Science and Astronautics by George Mueller, Associate
Administrator for Manned Space Flight, NASA, March 1969."

OK, both my suspicions are shot. The mystery deepens. It would be
reasonable for a 1969 source to quote the cost in constant-year 1969
dollars, which based on Jenkins' figures would have been $18.4 billion
spent to-date through 1969, and $21.4 billion for the actual as-flown
program through 1973. But at that point, Apollos 18-20 hadn't yet been
cancelled and Apollo Applications hadn't yet been truncated to just Skylab.
$24 billion sounds reasonable if the deleted content is added back in.

Did Lewis give any additional detail? In particular, was the $24 billion
the amount spent to-date through 1969, or the projected end-of-program
cost?

--
JRF

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Jorge R. Frank wrote:

"William R. Thompson" wrote:

In the rtevised edition of "Appointment on the Moon" by Richard S.
Lewis (Ballantine, 1969), Lewis mentions the $24 billion dollar price;
a footnote gives the source as "Report to the U.S. House of
Representatives'
Committee on Science and Astronautics by George Mueller, Associate
Administrator for Manned Space Flight, NASA, March 1969."

OK, both my suspicions are shot. The mystery deepens. It would be
reasonable for a 1969 source to quote the cost in constant-year 1969
dollars, which based on Jenkins' figures would have been $18.4 billion
spent to-date through 1969, and $21.4 billion for the actual as-flown
program through 1973. But at that point, Apollos 18-20 hadn't yet been
cancelled and Apollo Applications hadn't yet been truncated to just Skylab.
$24 billion sounds reasonable if the deleted content is added back in.

Did Lewis give any additional detail? In particular, was the $24 billion
the amount spent to-date through 1969, or the projected end-of-program
cost?

Lewis doesn't give a clue either way; his words are "Now the taxpayers
could see what they had purchased for $23,915,900,000" (p. 464).

Mueller may have included the projected costs of the yet-unflown Apollo
missions; he may have included unmanned projects flown in support of
Apollo (Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, Surveyor, Pioneer, Test & Training
Satellites).

--Bill Thompson

William R. Thompson wrote:

Lewis doesn't give a clue either way; his words are "Now the taxpayers
could see what they had purchased for $23,915,900,000" (p. 464).

Mueller may have included the projected costs of the yet-unflown Apollo
missions; he may have included unmanned projects flown in support of
Apollo (Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, Surveyor, Pioneer, Test & Training
Satellites).

Plus (d'oh!) the costs of Mercury and Gemini.

--Bill Thompson

"William R. Thompson" wrote in
:

Jorge R. Frank wrote:

"William R. Thompson" wrote:

In the rtevised edition of "Appointment on the Moon" by Richard S.
Lewis (Ballantine, 1969), Lewis mentions the $24 billion dollar
price; a footnote gives the source as "Report to the U.S. House of
Representatives'
Committee on Science and Astronautics by George Mueller, Associate
Administrator for Manned Space Flight, NASA, March 1969."

OK, both my suspicions are shot. The mystery deepens. It would be
reasonable for a 1969 source to quote the cost in constant-year 1969
dollars, which based on Jenkins' figures would have been $18.4
billion spent to-date through 1969, and $21.4 billion for the actual
as-flown program through 1973. But at that point, Apollos 18-20
hadn't yet been cancelled and Apollo Applications hadn't yet been
truncated to just Skylab. $24 billion sounds reasonable if the
deleted content is added back in.

Did Lewis give any additional detail? In particular, was the $24
billion the amount spent to-date through 1969, or the projected
end-of-program cost?

Lewis doesn't give a clue either way; his words are "Now the taxpayers
could see what they had purchased for $23,915,900,000" (p. 464).

Mueller may have included the projected costs of the yet-unflown
Apollo missions; he may have included unmanned projects flown in
support of Apollo (Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, Surveyor, Pioneer, Test &
Training Satellites).

Ah well, thanks anyway for looking! I don't have easy access to that
source.


--
JRF

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check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
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"GMW" wrote in message
.. .
Any have the formula for translating apllo era budgets and expenses into
now
dollars. I've been trying to get a feel for what Project Apollo would
cost
in today's degraded currency.



You'll get all sorts of answers. NASA's history of Apollo says it would be
about 192 million in 1995.

--
Alan Erskine
We can get people to the Moon in five years,
not the fifteen GWB proposes.
Give NASA a real challenge

You can find two official NASA versions at:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi...4214/app2.html

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi...205/app-h.html

Obviously in 1969 nobody could know the entire cost of the Apollo
program - maybe an estimated cost.

Various numbers bandied about are sometimes the cost up to
accomplishing the goal (Apollo 11) - or to the runout of the program
through Apollo 17. In 1969 flights beyond Apollo 17 were planned.

The extra $ 4 billion may be mostly DoD costs not included in NASA's
appropriation.

Not to mention, much to the dismay of engineering types, federal
accounting (or any accounting) is a mystery wrapped within an enigma.
Do you want to know on an appropriation, allocation, or obligation
basis? Adjusted for inflation by year of appropriation, obligation, or
allocation (or even expenditure, which would be most accurate, but is
a mystery on the federal level)?

There were probably also plenty of costs not in the official
accounting - Army Corps of Engineers, vendor over-runs not billed to
the government, unrecoverable contractor RDT&E, IR&D, entertainment
costs, etc. Conversely, cost-based Apollo contracts may have absorbed
overruns from over-budget fixed-price military programs (or even black
programs). Gosh knows what the real number was (not to mention
personal costs -- suicides, broken marriages, employee relocation on
the ramp-up, relocation and unemployment costs on the post-Apollo,
post-Vietnam aerospace crash, etc etc).

Given the relative meaninglessness of the inflation index as well, I
thing Jorge's original estimate is as good as you'll get -- any
'detailed' estimate would have to be footnoted with a couple of pages
of assumptions anyway...

Alan Erskine wrote:

You'll get all sorts of answers. NASA's history of Apollo says it would be
about 192 million in 1995.


Unless that refers to a single flight, or there is a supposed to be a
"b" not a "m" at the beginning of that "illion", that figure is
complete hogwash; even in 1995 dollars that would mean we were spending
more on a single year's Shuttle launches than on the whole Apollo program.

Pat