RIP. He made a later flight to the moon, as a command module pilot, the same thing he would have done on Apollo 13. So not on this chart: https://xkcd.com/893/
Space is awesome but people have to eat. Exploration is only really practical at current budget levels, percentage-wise.
Apollo was very early. The tech has to bring the price of a moon landing way down, and the safety level way up for us to do it again. It will be soon though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
I think that <5% is small (de minimus) and NASA ha been below that number for a long time
ISS might also be pretty expensive to maintain? Not sure. Dunno how much scientific value it's delivering, but it's pretty low on the "cool" factor compared to... almost anything else they do, really.
5% of the US government budget is massive.
Experimental scientific expeditions are critical, but the correct allocation is far below 1%.
I love NASA and the moon landings. It’s super admirable and a huge milestone in winning the cold war. Reading up on it, it’s unbelievable what they got done with ancient technology. But they were really early, and that’s why it was so expensive. It’s much more reasonable to go back in the next decade or so.
> NASA took up a good chunk of the US economy at the time.
And the benefits were felt in every single industry, from the bra industry to project management to teaching methods to computers and most obviously to the science and aeronautics communities.
Apollo 16 let Mattingly do something he would not have done on 13: A deep-space EVA during the return to Earth to retrieve film from the service module. Only occurred on 15-17.