User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

http://history.nasa.gov/Apollomon/Apollo.html

Project Apollo in general, and the flight of Apollo 11 in particular, should be viewed as a watershed in the nation's history. It was an endeavor that demonstrated both the technological and economic virtuosity of the United States and established technologically preeminence over rival nations--the primary goal of the program when first envisioned by the Kennedy administration in 1961. It had been an enormous undertaking, costing $25.4 billion (about $95 billion in 1990 dollars), with only the building of the Panama Canal rivaling the Apollo program's size as the largest non-military technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States and only the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb in World War II being comparable in a wartime setting.

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Project Apollo forced the people of the world to view the planet Earth in a new way. Apollo 8 was critical to this fundamental change, for on its outward voyage the crew focused a portable television camera on Earth and for the first time humanity saw its home from afar, a tiny, lovely, and fragile "blue marble" hanging in the blackness of space.

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The Apollo space program was the largest technical undertaking of the twentieth century. In three short years, from 1969-1972, nine missions headed to the moon, and six of them landed men on its surface and safely returned home.

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• Congressional Budget Office Study: A Budgetary Analysis of NASA’s New Vision for Space Exploration September 2004

The total cost of the program in 2005 dollars was about $170 billion. That total included all research and development (R&D) costs; the cost of procuring 15 Saturn V rockets, 16 command service modules (C/SMs), and 12 lunar modules; program support and management costs; expenses for facilities and their upgrading; and the cost of conducting flight operations.