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SBF couldn't even keep track of a $40B because it seemed like too much of a hassle. It's interesting that people like that are business visionaries and yet the government is deemed ineffectual unless it's operating with 100% efficiency.

But again, the stuff we got from the space program makes it all an extreme bargain.

The amount of learned knowledge and skills from an endeavor like the space program extends out to so many industries. We can thank the space program for vital inventions like the Super Soaker

Accounting for inflation, that would be more like $335 billion today - still a manageable cost for a wealthy nation, but not peanuts.

Apollo consumed 2.5% of gdp every year for a decade.

That’s a massively expensive prestige project.

Considering that the soviets concentrated on building space stations, yielding hardware that is still in use for active scientific purposes I would argue it wasn’t a good way to spend that value.