By decade’s end, the extraordinary success of the project had been matched only by its exorbitant cost: at its peak, NASA had some four hundred thousand men and women at work on Apollo, and the price of the program’s support facilities alone was $2.2 billion; the technology and materials of the lunar lander were so exotic that each one cost fifteen times its weight in gold. In total the project would cost the country an astonishing $28 billion—the equivalent to a third of all US military spending for 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War.
