I read this in a news article today about Griffin's (NASA's new head honcho) visit to the Johnson Space Center:

"Griffin said the agency has received a steady flow of funding that when adjusted for inflation is comparable to the funding the agency had when it first sent astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program of the 1960s and early 1970s."

This is completely wrong, isn't it? I have always thought that funding back then was huge compared to today.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/apollo/
Not sure of the exact number of years, but we are within the ballpark of a few billion per year.

It's probably about right. NASA's budget back then was around $4 billion; today it's around $16 billion. And the accumulated inflation rate, 1970-2005, is about 400%.

What has changed is NASA's share of the federal budget: In 1970, it was $4 billion out of $200 billion - 2% of the total budget. If that share had been maintained, today NASA would be spending over $40 billion a year.

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I guess, they paid less bureaucrats and more engineers in the Sixties.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

True, in part. Bureaucracy grows over time, especially in government. It also helps to have a specific goal. And, it is important to remember that the inflation rate is an average. Aerospace costs have tended to grow faster than inflation. One of the more interesting questions in private space development is if the cost growth is a fact of life ("space is hard") or if it is an artifact of an industry where there hasn't been that much incentive to keep the costs down. Perhaps new blood will change the picture, as it did for the computer industry. Or perhaps not. We'll just have to see.

I saw an essay once that demonstrated that if trends continue, the entire US defense budget in 2071 would buy exactly one fighter plane.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.