User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

http://history.nasa.gov/Apollomon/Apollo.html

Project Apollo in general, and the flight of Apollo 11 in particular, should be viewed as a watershed in the nation's history. It was an endeavor that demonstrated both the technological and economic virtuosity of the United States and established technologically preeminence over rival nations--the primary goal of the program when first envisioned by the Kennedy administration in 1961. It had been an enormous undertaking, costing $25.4 billion (about $95 billion in 1990 dollars), with only the building of the Panama Canal rivaling the Apollo program's size as the largest non-military technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States and only the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb in World War II being comparable in a wartime setting.

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he cost of the entire Apollo program: USD $25.4 billion -1969 Dollars ($135-billion in 2005 Dollars). See NASA Budget. (Includes Mercury, Gemini, Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbitar, Apollo programs.) Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket cost alone, was about $ 83-billion 2005 Dollars (Apollo spacecraft cost $ 28-billion (CS/M $ 17-billion; LM $ 11-billion), Saturn I, IB, V costs about $ 46-billion 2005 dollars).

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Project Apollo forced the people of the world to view the planet Earth in a new way. Apollo 8 was critical to this fundamental change, for on its outward voyage the crew focused a portable television camera on Earth and for the first time humanity saw its home from afar, a tiny, lovely, and fragile "blue marble" hanging in the blackness of space.

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The Apollo space program was the largest technical undertaking of the twentieth century. In three short years, from 1969-1972, nine missions headed to the moon, and six of them landed men on its surface and safely returned home.