The cost of putting a man on the moon

Forty years ago today, Apollo 11 took off from its launch site in Florida to take Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins on their historic trip to the moon. In five days time, Armstrong would descend the ladder of the Eagle module, uttering his infamous words as the world watched and held its collective breath.

Even today, going into space is still a risky business, but back in 1969, it was considered by many to be semi-suicidal. Whilst the tragedies of Challenger and Columbia happened in low Earth orbit, Apollo 11's mission would take them 238,857 miles from home, far from any kind of help. The three men would be on their own. The mission was groundbreaking in every conceivable way, namely in cost.

In 1961, when the USSR successfully put Major Yuri Gagarin into space, America rose to the challenge of the space race. President Kennedy consulted the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) to see what they could do to match or beat the Soviets, and they put forward their plan for lunar exploration, a plan that had been shelved since 1961 for being too expensive. Back then, the project had had a price tag of over $11 billion not to mention the challenges in developing the technology needed for such a feat. President Kennedy was reportedly unsure as the mission had no guarantees of success and it was a lot of money to spend on such an unknown venture. It was his vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson that convinced him otherwise saying that, "To be second in space is to be second in everything."

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After Kennedy's historic speech at Rice Stadium in September 1962, where he famously told the country that were going to the moon "not because (it was) easy, but because (it was) hard", NASA went about marshalling over 400,000 men and woman to take on this single goal.

However, a project with so many unknown variables suffered enormous setbacks. Newspapers from the era were filled with NASA's "show stopping" engineering set-backs, such as exploding test rockets, the problems of designing a command module and of course the tragedy of the Apollo 1 fire that saw three astronauts burn to death in a routine safety check. But against all the odds, on the 16 July 1969, just 30 months after the Apollo 1fire - the first Saturn V rocket, the heaviest vehicle ever to lift off the ground, broke through the Earth's atmosphere on its way to the moon.

Today though, NASA still faces the same problems they faced 40 years ago in getting to the moon - cost. There are fears they may have to scrap their current moon project due to its spiralling costs, despite them having already spent $3 billion (£1.8 billion) on it already. NASA's Constellation project aims to return US astronauts to the moon, and possibly then to Mars, but it has been hit by technical problems and huge costs which have prompted the Obama administration to re-examine the project which is currently project to cost $35 billion.

If it goes ahead, NASA is aiming to build the first of a new generation of manned rockets by 2020.

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