posted 12-22-2012 09:24 AM               

You really cannot fairly compare that to what the space shuttle actually cost, as that takes into consideration data not available at the time of the decision. The projected cost savings of the shuttle in 1969 negated any choice of extending and upgrading the Saturn V.

posted 12-22-2012 09:57 AM            

Once again, a look at the budgetary history provides a sobering lesson for the future, a sobering view of "what might have been." Let's recycle to the early 1970s, a time of budgetary starvation for NASA, a time when we did not yet have the Space Shuttle, but did still have the Apollo systems - the Saturn I-B and Saturn V, the Apollo command/service modules (CSM), the lunar lander, and the Skylab system. All of these things were in existence in 1973, having been created in that seminal first 15 years of our agency's history.

Make no mistake; these systems were far from perfect. They were expensive to develop and expensive to operate. Our parents and grandparents, metaphorically speaking, did not really know quite what they were doing when they set out to accept President Kennedy's challenge to go to the Moon. They learned as they went along. But what they eventually built worked, and worked well. And it could have kept working at a price we could afford.

Let's look at some recurring costs in dollars then and now. All costs include both hardware and mission operations, and are at the high end of the range of possibilities, because they take no advantage of stable rates of production. Fiscal 2000 costs are approximate, obtained by inflating programs in the aggregate, rather than tracking and inflating separate expenditures of real-year dollars.

Element	Real-Year $ M	FY 2000 $ M
Apollo CSM	50	160
Apollo Lunar Module	120	400
Apollo Lunar Mission	720	2400
Saturn I-B	35	120
Saturn V	325	1100
Skylab Cluster	275	925

Let's assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars.

Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago.