The Impact of Inflation on the Apollo Mission

The maximum annual budget of the Apollo mission era was roughly twice what NASA's budget is now. It wasn't motivated initially on the basis of science, it was motivated as kind of just a arm wrestle to see who would do it better and get there. And then once we proved that we could do it, people weren't interested immediately. Once Apollo 11 landed, they were plans, okay, we're not going to continue doing this. The suspicion is he did that because he didn't want to have anything, any program in his administration that had Kennedy's name on it.