It's hard to find data on the individual cost of Soviet space programs. Wikipedia gives the total cost for the Luna program at 4.5 billion dollars, but that fig

It's hard to find data on the individual cost of Soviet space programs. Wikipedia gives the total cost for the Luna program at 4.5 billion dollars, but that figure is unsourced, and it's unclear whether they're 1969 or 2008 dollars. In any case, the Apollo program easily wins in kg/dollar. The total cost of the Apollo program was just 22 billion 1969 dollars, so a bit more than 60 million 1969 dollars per kilo and obviously the program did much, much more than just return some rocks. On the other hand, just launching the Proton-K rocket that got the Luna 16 to the moon cost 100 million 1969 dollars, so up to 1 billion dollars per kilo. And that's not counting the development cost of the vehicle etc... Good news for the future though, China is planning to send a sample-return mission in November[0] and they plan to return at least 2 kilograms. If they succeed, I guess you don't need humans for that either 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_5