Apollo

Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, landed six crews on the Moon and put twelve people on the surface. It was the largest peacetime engineering effort the United States has ever run, it spent about 25.8 billion dollars between 1960 and 1973, and its schedule came out of a speech rather than out of a plan.

How it went

1. 01

   Kennedy set the deadline on 25 May 1961, before anyone had decided how a landing would be flown, what it would need, or what it would cost.

2. 02

   A fire on the pad killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee on 27 January 1967, and the redesign that followed suspended crewed launches for nearly a year.

3. 03

   Apollo 8 carried a crew into lunar orbit in December 1968, less than two years after the fire that had nearly ended the programme.

4. 04

   Armstrong and Aldrin landed on 20 July 1969, eight years and two months after the speech that ordered it.

5. 05

   Apollo 13 lost an oxygen tank and came home anyway, which is the flight that shows what the organisation had actually turned into.

6. 06

   The money went as soon as the point was made, and Apollo 17 left the surface in December 1972 with nobody scheduled to follow.

What it flew

• Saturn IB
• Saturn V

What it cost, what it got

Six landings and twelve people on the Moon, for about 25.8 billion dollars spent between 1960 and 1973, roughly 309 billion in 2025 dollars, and three lives lost on the pad in 1967. It answered a political question so completely that the capability was dismantled once the answer was in.

Sources

1. 1The Apollo ProgramNASA
2. 2Apollo 1NASA
3. 3How much did the Apollo program costThe Planetary Society