User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox
http://history.nasa.gov/Apollomon/Apollo.html
The Apollo program in general, and the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in particular, should be viewed as a watershed in the history of the United States. It demonstrated both the technological and economic virtuosity of the United States and established technological preeminence over rival nations -- the primary goal of the program when first envisioned by President Kennedy in 1961.
It had been an enormous undertaking, costing $25.4 billion (about $170 billion in 2005 dollars),[1] Only the building of the Panama Canal rivaled 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 was comparable in a wartime setting.
The Apollo program gave the people of the world a new view of the planet Earth. On their outward voyage to the Moon, the crew of Apollo 8 focused a television camera on Earth and for the first time humanity saw its home as a tiny, lovely, and fragile "blue marble" hanging in the blackness of space.
http://next.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11-nara.html
enlisted 20,000 companies, hundreds of thousands of individuals, and some 25.5 billion dollars.
==========
- ↑ A Congressional Budget Office Study: A Budgetary Analysis of NASA’s New Vision for Space Exploration Sept. 2004. A quote from the bottom part of pdf page 38 of 58 pdf pages: "The total cost of the [Apollo] program in 2005 dollars was about $170 billion."