At US$196 billion, the amount of money US taxpayers spent during the lifetime of the space shuttle program seems astronomical.
However, the entire US federal government spends that much in just three weeks. In big bucks Washington, even US$196 billion is relative.
The space shuttle is a bargain compared to wars, healthcare, tax cuts and budget deficits. However, compared with the Apollo program and even some of the banking, auto and insurance industry bailouts, the price for going into orbit seems a tad high.
For that US$196 billion, the US got five space shuttles and what will be 135 flights, when the last launch, scheduled for Friday, is included. That figure includes design and construction spending dating back 40 years to when the program was first conceived. When all of that is included, the cost per launch is about US$1.5 billion. If you exclude those early expenses and costs for upgrades and so forth, the average operating cost of a shuttle flight is US$847 million.
So even at the cheaper calculation, each shuttle launch on average costs more than the US$800 million that the US Food and Drug Administration spends in an entire year on food safety.
The overall US$196 billion is also slightly more than the US$182 billion bailout of failed insurance giant AIG and much more than the US$45 billion apiece that went to Bank of America and Citigroup to shore them up in 2008 when the nation’s financial system was teetering on the brink. It dwarfs the US$49.5 billion rescue of General Motors and the US$12.5 billion bailout of Chrysler.
Compared with other big engineering concepts, even when adjusted for inflation, the space shuttle program might have gotten less bang for more bucks. The Apollo program to the moon cost US$156 billion, the Manhattan project that created the first nuclear bomb cost about US$29 billion and digging the Panama Canal cost US$8 billion, the Smithsonian Institution said. The US got the moon, the bomb and the canal for a total of US$193 billion — US$3 billion less than the space shuttle.
However, compared with other federal spending, the space shuttle barely gets off the ground in terms of big money.
Last year, the federal Medicare healthcare program for the elderly spent US$196 billion in about five months. The 40-year lifetime price tag of the space shuttle program is less than one-sixth the government’s US$1.2 trillion estimate for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars so far. The current federal budget deficit is heading for about US$1.4 trillion — seven times the shuttle program’s overall cost. Experts put the cost to federal coffers of the 2001 tax cut at somewhere between US$1 trillion and US$2 trillion.
For a more down-to-Earth comparison, the space shuttle doesn’t quite measure up to the family car. It costs about US$0.37 per kilometer to drive a car on average, according to AAA. The cost of the 861 million kilometers flown by the space shuttle is about US$224 per kilometer.
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