cosmicdave said: "Over the same period as the Apollo missions (Apollo 1 was launched in 1967) that would be 6 years and that doesnt include the years of budget taken to make the first craft and test it. 6 x $14.3 Billion would equal almost $86 billion. This means that over the same time scale of the Apollo flights, not including any further budget increases within that time, NASA could accumulate over 3 times as much money than they needed for the original Apollo missions. Argueing that NASA would be cash strapped in unrealistic."

Dave

Once again you’ve sidestepped the issue of inflation. So I’m going to explain it for the benefit of you and other people who may happen to read this thread.

According to my dictionary, inflation is a substantial rise in prices due to an undue expansion in money supply or credit. Of course, the consequence of inflation is that the same number of dollars will buy you a smaller amount of stuff than before. For example, I remember that back in the late 1970s, a dollar would buy you a little over 3 litres of petrol (gasoline for you Yanks). These days, you’ll get little more than 1 litre of petrol from a dollar.

So when people talk about the Moon landings costing $25 billion in 1960s money, they’re talking about dollars which bought a lot more then than they do now. Since then, inflation would have cut the purchasing power of most Western currencies by around ¾, or even more. In other words, what you could buy for $25 billion back then would cost you at least $100 billion now.

Given that NASA’s budget is supposed to be around $14 billion a year, it would take about 7 years to fund Apollo these days, assuming it funded absolutely nothing else. Of course, at the time NASA was involved in Apollo, it was also involved in many other projects, such as the Mariner spacecraft which flew by Mars and Venus, planning for the upcoming Viking missions, meteorology or communications. I don’t know much about NASA’s budget back then, but I’d be curious to see some figures showing what proportion of NASA’s budget went to Apollo.

In conclusion, you can't compare NASA's budget these days with the cost of the Apollo program, because they use dollars of completely different values.