[rst]

You're misreading the chart -- a bit farther down, there are lines giving a ~$3.8 billion total cost for "command and service modules", and ~$2.2 billion for "lunar module". And those figures don't include spacecraft systems which have their own line items (e.g., "guidance and navigation"), or the cost of the rockets that launched the spacecraft.

The "spacecraft development" line you're looking at includes only charges for 1962, while the program was still in its earliest phases, most likely before mission mode (and the separation of command and lunar modules) had even been decided.

And you can multiply all those figures by about 7 to correct for inflation and give you the rough cost in today's dollars.

Apollo was hugely expensive.

[jkot]

Original article states that 3/4 of Apollo budget went into 'non-recoverable hardware'. It is very misleading.