Moon men and the Mars index

NASA’s auditor has totted up the cost of the Moon programme, through 2025. How does Artemis compare to Apollo?

THIS week we learned the cost of going back to the Moon: $86bn. A breakdown from the NASA Office of Inspector General – released via Twitter as an infographic reproduced below – doesn’t reveal so much detail, but the headline figure for spending, committed and requested, through FY2025 does at least beg the question of value for money. Since $86bn is no trivial sum it also begs the question, “why?” But that’s a question that space enthusiasts don’t much ask (their answer being, “obviously”), so while it warrants consideration I’ll leave it for another time.

Value-for-money yes-or-no is anyway a much more complicated question than it appears. Ask it about Apollo and, invariably, one is reminded that we have great spin-offs like Teflon and Gore-Tex; which either says “value” or “an expensive way to get non-stick pans and waterproof jackets”. [We also got lots of great technology spin-offs from WWII, but nobody would suggest fighting the war was therefore good value.] And, Apollo value arguments also discount the cheaper and less dangerous alternative of sample-return missions to acquire a stash of Moon rocks. Again, let’s look at that another time!

But in pure cash outlay terms, how do we compare $86bn for Artemis to $283bn for Apollo? That Apollo figure comes from wonderful work by the Planetary Society, which totted up Moon-directed spending from 1960 to 1973 – just after the last Apollo mission flew – and then inflation-adjusted the resulting $28bn into 2020 dollars; result, $283bn, or more than 3x Artemis spending through 2025.

From that point, comparison gets difficult. Or, even more difficult given the apparent poverty of the records. As the Planetary Society observes, records don’t offer much confidence in year-by-year spending breakdowns, and anyway inflation-adjusting is always challenging*. Since human spaceflight in the early 1960s was pathfinding activity, its development would have been very, very expensive – especially given the urgency attached to a project whose participants were spread across the USA and had not so much as a fax machine to coordinate their efforts. Today, human spaceflight is much better understood and engineers enjoy communication, calculating, modelling and manufacturing tools unimaginable to their Apollo-era counterparts – not to mention the entire body of knowledge built up by Apollo.

Moreover, Apollo spending was heavily front-loaded, to establish a hardware architecture on which to progress. The same may be true of the $86bn spent or committed to Artemis – the cash outlay for developing the SLS rocket is met early on, and flight operations fall mostly into marginal costs. But there are some really big items yet to be paid for, and all historical experience warns us to expect them to cost more - probably much more - than any rough budget assumes.

It’s also not obvious that NASA OIG’s figures include the whole cost of Artemis. Some of the work done on George W Bush’s abandoned “Constellation” Moon scheme remains valuable. Some of its spending may be reasonably applied to SLS, which has been in development since 2011 – already nearly as long as the Planetary Society’s Apollo period. A great deal of the NASA spending that has gone to the International Space Station should be allocated to any Artemis tally, too; all that has been learned about human physiology, life support, toilets, eating, etc supports a Moon effort.

On top of that, NASA may for example contract SpaceX to launch any components of the Artemis scheme. In that case, NASA financial support for Falcon 9 development – some $450m – should be in part apportioned to the Moon.

And, lastly, that $86bn is US spending on Artemis. It does not include European Space Agency spending on the European Service Module that will provide life support, avionics and propulsion for NASA’s Moon-bound Orion crew capsules. ESM spending must include some – large? – portion of the money spent on the Automated Transfer Vehicle ISS resupply ship programme, on which it is based. This sort of spending, from NASA’s perspective, comes “free”; instead, ESA pays Airbus to deliver ATVs and now ESMs, and “barters” the hardware, launches and ground support for European seats on the ISS or Orion. See also the ISSpresso machine; crews spending extended periods off-Earth cannot be expected to live on great views alone.

If Artemis rumbles on until everything is ready to go, costs may be better contained than if there’s a rush to meet a deadline. Apollo cost more than it needed to (including in human lives) owing to the frantic push to make it before the calendar turned over to 1970; since 2024 was arbitrary – or at least is arbitrary now, given that Donald Trump won’t be whipping NASA to have him basking in Moonlight before an election – the programme can “afford” to drag on while studies and tests and redesigns take their time.

All being said, it’s hard to say whether $86bn is a little or a lot compared to $283bn. For those who see $86bn and counting as a lot, space people owe them a proper discussion of “why”.

*As a footnote to inflation-adjusting, economists like to track the price of Mars bars. The assumption is that the product remains the same basket of commodities – cocoa beans, milk, nuts, sugar, etc – and so it makes a convenient time-travelling price yardstick that can be compared to wages and prices of goods whose quality or relative desirability may change dramatically with time. How many Mars bars could have been bought for the 1960 price of a family car versus the 2020 price of such a vehicle? If a consumer on median wage spent a year’s money on Mars bars, how many would they have bought in 1960 versus 2020?

Sadly, the weight of Mars bars seems to have changed (shrunk!) over time and so even this straightforward inflation calculator is prone to wild error. Anyway, whether or not astronauts should carry Mars bars on a Moon mission is, perhaps, a question for the philosophers.

Comforts of home: Italy’s Samantha Cristoforetti commissions the ISSpresso machine, Expedition 43, 2015 (c NASA/ESA)

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Dan Thisdell adds: I write about European spaceflight: industry, politics, science and money. After a fruitful mid-career at Flight International, I am preparing to launch a newsletter for space industry investors: Geoconomy. Watch this space and contact me via LinkedIn - especially if your company should be profiled.