Moon mission - costs?

[alex04]

This may be a difficult one to answer,

but is there any way to gauge the difference in cost, between,

- having a mission to the moon back in the 1970s

- having a mission to the moon at present day

?

[PhantomWolf]

I'd suggest Googling a bit, I recall a website listing the costs of Apollo in 1990 dollars, might have been updated since, or you might be able to locate the cost of Apollo and what inflation is for the dollar since 1970. NASA should have some guesstimates about how much it will cost to return with Orion. Keep in mind though that the missions are different lengths which will make Orion more expensive in some areas.

[Kiwi]

Here in New Zealand our Reserve Bank has an inflation calculator
www.rbnz.govt.nz/statistics/0135595.html
-- you just put in the the original amount and the year, and what year you want it converted to. You might have something similar in your country.

Being an amateur historian I've often wanted to convert sums from one year to another, so have made up charts covering from the present back to many years before New Zealand had money, using NZ and British figures. I got the NZ figures from our Department of Statistics.

Bart Sibrel, on his error-riddled DVD A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon (2001), says the following:

0:19:08 The cost of the programme, whose sole goal was to be the first to plant a flag on the lifeless rock just outside the earth, if adjusted for inflation to the 21st century, was $135 billion.

0:29:18 The cost of the three moon rovers in 21st-century currency? Nearly $60 million. Each. Though they had fewer parts than a jeep. Where was all this money going?

I have no idea whether this information is just as unreliable as so much other information on the DVD.

[alex04]

thanks guys.

I was actually sure i'd read an in-depth discussion on this, somewhere on this forum a while back - but searches have yielded no results.

[PhantomWolf]

I wouldn't be surprised if they were $60 million each, the problem that BS misses is that there were only 3 or 4 built compared to the millions of Jeeps that have been build. That means that they had to have custom made parts and all the research costs were spread over just a couple of vehicles whereas a jeep has parts that mass produced and research costs can be spread over the hundreds of thousands of units produced worldwide.