3 charts that show how Artemis compares to Apollo

Apollo remains the single historical example of a successful human lunar landing program. So, despite the technological and geopolitical changes of the past half-century, there can be value in contrasting it to NASA’s current return-to-the-Moon effort, Artemis.

The United States funded Apollo like a race it had to win; it funded Artemis like a casual stroll turned into a jog.

President Kennedy, in his speech to Congress calling for a lunar landing project, did not shy from the cost of the endeavor: “I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs…there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.”

Congress took on the burden. In its first few years, funding for Apollo increased by a factor of 10, topping out at roughly $42 billion per year in inflation-adjusted dollars. In total, the United States spent just over $300 billion over the course of the program, which ended 12 years later. 

Artemis, by contrast, has received a much more modest commitment. Since 2017 (the year that Space Policy Directive #1 set the Moon as the centerpiece of U.S. space exploration policy), NASA has spent, on average, about $6 billion per year (inflation-adjusted) on Artemis-related projects.

The point isn’t so much that Apollo got a lot more money (NASA didn’t have a commercial aerospace market, fixed-price contracts, or much of the physical infrastructure that the agency now leverages for Artemis); it is that the early surge of funding enabled NASA to tackle the range of engineering and design challenges required to send astronauts to the Moon. For most of Artemis’ existence, it received the same amount of funding each year, regardless of any specific challenges the program faced.

During Apollo, there was a directed, rapid, and ambitious effort to understand the Moon with robotic spacecraft before astronauts arrived.

At the outset of Apollo, so little was known about the surface of the Moon that some scientists worried that astronauts would simply sink into it like quicksand. NASA needed to know what its astronauts were getting into, and it launched a series of robotic programs — Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter — to characterize the lunar environment, map the surface, and practice landing.

In total, NASA launched 21 lunar robotic missions in seven years, at a cost of approximately $12 billion (inflation-adjusted). The effort was so comprehensive that nearly two decades went by before NASA launched another lunar robotic mission.

NASA’s workforce tripled to meet the challenge of Apollo; during Artemis, the agency lost 20% of its workforce and faces a serious crisis in morale.

NASA's civil service workforce exploded in the early days of Apollo, growing from roughly 10,000 people in 1960 to nearly 35,000 by 1964. The surge in hiring reflected the surge in funding, and it brought in the talent to design, build, test, and plan the range of engineering challenges required to reach the Moon.

NASA in 2026 faces arguably greater ambition: returning humans to the lunar surface and establishing the infrastructure for a lunar base. But it must do so with a fraction of the workforce. Roughly one in five employees departed NASA in 2025, the largest single-year percentage loss of staff in the agency's history. NASA now has about 14,000 civil servants, the agency’s smallest workforce since before Kennedy's 1961 address to Congress. These losses have cratered morale, with nearly half of NASA employees reporting that their teams have gotten worse at meeting deadlines and more than a third stating that they are worse at delivering quality services.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has launched "NASA Force," an initiative to recruit thousands of skilled engineers from industry, but these are two-year term appointments, not permanent positions.

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