The Speculist

Comparing Apples to Apollos

Assaying Space Policy’s Coin of the Realm (Part 1)

            “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” – Attrib. to Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen (b.1896 d. 1969 House of Representatives 1933 - 1951, Senate 1951 - 1969)

[Author’s Note: If the variable-quality punditry of the blogosphere constitutes, in the immortal words of James Lileks, “free ice cream”, then the vast volume of primary and secondary research sources must constitute complementary cake, or for the francophones gateau gratis. It is to this resource that I owe a debt of gratitude for assisting in compiling the following that goes beyond the capability of mere citation and hyperlinking to properly acknowledge. My thanks to all who have laid the groundwork.]

            [Dateline: The secret lair of the intellectual guerilla known as El Jefe Grande, 8 February, 2004]

            The distinctly minimalist approach that the Speculist and members of the FastForward Posse M104 have taken to addressing the recently-proposed National Space Policy is a conscious matter of editorial policy. Simply put, if the issue is to be taken seriously, it deserves careful, deliberate consideration of all facets (including, but not exclusively limited to, its political dimensions both internal and geopolitical). As enthusiasts of all things futuristic, we believe that the eventual expansion of human activities and terrestrial biology into the cosmos is a positive and eventually inevitable development. We also tend to believe that, given humanitiy’s recently-acquired awareness of the hazards that may befall any given single celestial body, such an expansion is better undertaken sooner rather than later and to the greatest extent possible given the capabilities at hand.

            Having established our position regarding the fundamental question of whether travel to and colonization of other celestial bodies is a desirable goal, I’d like to present some information that may assist us and other interested parties to evaluate the options currently available in an objective and historically-grounded manner.

            Among several other problems attendant to evaluating the currently elaborated National Space Policy is a certain lack of adequate historical perspective surrounding the debate. Much of the program presented seems to be a reaccomplishment of feats already performed and, that said, there is a tendency to wish to compare the plan on offer to the previous one in an effort to establish the degree of realism on the part of the parties and organizations making the proposal.

            Unfortunately, such a large effort is very difficult to pin a firm price tag on. The Apollo program took place over a span of thirteen years and ended over three decades ago. What information is available regarding its expenditures is cast in the economic vernacular of that period and so provides little real basis of comparison against today’s plans unless subjected to a certain amount of adjustment to contemporary referents. In the discussion that follows I will try to make such adjustments and point those interested to both the available historical data sources and to source information about the current National Space Policy in the hope that such effort may at least contribute to serious consideration of our collective goals and progress in what I feel is the single most historically significant activity of modern humanity.

            Apollo by the Numbers, a NASA publication from 2000, has a table detailing annual expenditures on Apollo line-items in thousands of current-year dollars. The totals are as follows (for the sake of clarity I’ve converted implied thousands to literal ones.):

            1960: $100,000

            1961: $1,000,000

            1962: $160,000,000

            1963: $617,164,000

            1964: $2,272,952,000

            1965: $2,614,619,000

            1966: $2,967,385,000

            1967: $2,916,200,000

            1968: $2,556,000,000

            1969: $2,025,000,000

            1970: $1,686,145,000

            1971: $913,669,000

            1972: $601,200,000

            1973: $76,700,000

            Program Total: $19,408,134,000

            Nearly nineteen and a half billion dollars over thirteen years.

            This, however, only tells part of the story. As anyone knows who has had opportunity to make purchases over an extended period of time, a dollar just doesn’t buy what it used to. This is the short, colloquial definition of inflation. One, commonly utilized if not exclusively accurate, measure of inflation is the Consumer Price Index. This measure of inflation tracks the changes in prices of a relatively consistent “market basket” of items supposedly typical of regular purchases made by urban consumers and uses those changes as an indicator of the general rate of price changes throughout the economy. The primary advantages of utilizing CPI to correct prices from one period to be more consistent with current prices is the length of time that this approach has been used (CPI data are available for the period from 1913 to present) and the fact that the U.S. Government publishes CPI data quarterly, meaning that the information is readily available. The CPI can be thought of as a correction factor for changing past prices to values from another era, either one also in the past (What would a Model T’s equivalent cost have purchased during the Nixon administration?) or brining them up to date for comparison to current prices. (Those interested in the intricacies of applying CPI data may indicate their interest in the comments. If interest is sufficient, I’ll write up the gory details for a later Speculist University piece.)

            Corrected for inflation, the numbers become (In 2003 current dollars):

            1960: $622,000

            1961: $6,154,000

            1962: $974,834,000

            1963: $3,711,052,000

            1964: $13,491,070,000

            1965: $15,272,695,000

            1966: $16,851,816,000

            1967: $16,065,293,000

            1968: $13,514,483,000

            1969: $10,152,589,000

            1970: $7,996,152,000

            1971: $4,150,990,000

            1972: $2,646,431,000

            1973: $317,856,000

            Program Total: $105,152,035,000

            This figure, hereinafter referred to as “1 Apollo (2003$)”, forms the jumping-off point for the analysis to follow.

            The subject of ‘progress’ is addressed frequently in this blog in various forms. One form of which that also bears on the comparison of the Apollo program to the proposed National Space Policy is the growth of the economy in the intervening thirty years. Not only can the United States economy produce more ‘stuff’ (Note the use of highly-technical economic terminology. – Auth.) than it did in ‘73, that ‘stuff’ is, itself, of higher quality, greater utility, less expensive, or some combination of the three. Since the ‘market basket’ used to calculate CPI is held relatively constant in order to make it more applicable across a longer period it does a poor job of reflecting this sort of progress. Fortunately for our analysis there is a measure that has been collected over the relevant period that does take such advance inherently into account. Gross Domestic Product, simplistically defined, is a measure of all of the ‘stuff’ (Okay, material goods and services. – Auth.) produced within the national economy over the period of a year. For the years in question (Current Year $):

            1960: $526,400,000,000

            1961: $544,700,000,000

            1962: $585,600,000,000

            1963: $617,700,000,000

            1964: $663,600,000,000

            1965: $719,100,000,000

            1966: $787,800,000,000

            1967: $832,600,000,000

            1968: $910,000,000,000

            1969: $984,600,000,000

            1970: $1,038,500,000,000

            1971: $1,127,100,000,000

            1972: $1,238,300,000,000

            1973: $1,382,700,000,000

            By comparing the (Current Year $) NASA Apollo spending to GDP for the years in question we can begin to get a feeling for the level of national effort involved in placing a dozen men on the moon for a total stay (in person-hours) of 24 days 23 hours 09 minutes 36.8 seconds, and “returning them safely to the Earth” . Expressed as a percentage of GDP the Apollo program looks like this:

            1960: 0.00002%

            1961: 0.00018%

            1962: 0.02732%

            1963: 0.09991%

            1964: 0.34252%

            1965: 0.36360%

            1966: 0.37667%

            1967: 0.35025%

            1968: 0.28088%

            1969: 0.20567%

            1970: 0.16236%

            1971: 0.08106%

            1972: 0.04855%

            1973: 0.00555%

            Finally, at least for the first part of this piece, we should address the issue of the Apollo program’s impact on NASA’s contemporary budgets to begin the process of allaying the fears that some have expressed that the current National Space Policy will prove the undoing of those things that NASA is doing to fund things that it might do. NASA’s budgets for the period were (Current Year $):

            1960: $523,575,000

            1961: $964,000,000

            1962: $1,671,750,000

            1963:  $3,674,115,000

            1964: $3,974,979,000

            1965: $4,270,695,000

            1966: $4,511,644,000

            1967: $4,175,100,000

            1968: $3,970,000,000

            1969: $3,193,559,000

            1970: $3,113,765,000

            1971: $2,555,000,000

            1972: $2,517,700,000

            1973: $2,509,900,000

Apollo’s portion:

            1960: 0.02%

            1961: 0.10%

            1962: 9.57%

            1963: 16.80%

            1964: 57.18%

            1965: 61.22%

            1966: 65.77%

            1967: 69.85%

            1968: 64.38%

            1969: 63.41%

            1970: 54.15%

            1971: 35.76%

            1972: 23.88%

            1973: 3.06%

            At this point, I’ll allow the audience to digest the information I’ve presented to this point. In my next entry on this topic I’ll use this background to illuminate some more detailed aspects of the proposed National Space Policy and, using the comparison, attempt to draw some conclusions about the feasability and desirability of the programs outlined in it.

 

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at February 10, 2004 08:44 PM | TrackBack