That is not how inflationary comparisons work with government budgets. The entire documented cost of the Apollo program[1] was $25.4 billion over 11 years. Adju

That is not how inflationary comparisons work with government budgets. The entire documented cost of the Apollo program[1] was $25.4 billion over 11 years. Adjusted for 2018 dollars that's $153 billion over 11 years, which works out to just about $14 billion per year. The total expenditure in the 2018 United States budget was $4.109 trillion[2] or %0.34 of yearly expenditures. Budgets do not follow inflationary trends even remotely, the 1961 expenditure[3] was $181.588 billion (wow that's pretty crazy). For the year that makes the Apollo program %1.2 of the federal expenditure. Another useful point of reference, the entire NASA organization in 2018 had an operating budget of $19.2 billion and this has to cover all of the mandated projects such as the SLS. They're also responsible for maintaining and monitoring a lot of infrastructure for other agencies (the weather service, DSN, etc) which wasn't the case during the Apollo mission. NASA itself is kind of left with scraps. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud... [3]: https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1960_1970USb_20s2li011mcn_F0f https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1960_1970USb_...