[mmustapic]

The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.

Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.

[panick21]

The budget is actually not that much worse. If you adjust for inflation.

On avg NASA budget was about the same as now. But now we do more things now. But between Constellation/SLS and Orion this new Shuttle based architecture has as much money as Apollo while having done almost non of it. Before it is where Apollo ended up, it will cost much, much more then Apollo.

But even if what you said was true, a gigantic amount of infrastructure that was paid for in the 1960s is still in use today. A huge amount of fundamental research that was required is already done. That alone should make it much cheaper.

Same goes for development, Artemis is not developing any new engines, while Apollo had to develop many new engines.

> The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor.

Except of course that Korea/Vietnam were much more expensive then what were are doing now.

[mmustapic]

The budget is very much different, as % of the total federal budget (4% vs 1%) and in USD adjusted for inflation (60B vs 20B).

[Robdel12]

And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.

I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!

[NetMageSCW]

Actually less than half at best were behind Apollo and most thought it cost too much and that social programs were worth supporting more, and after the landings succeeded we didn’t continue anywhere because even that support waned.