Nell Greenfield Boyce

Wow.

Well, it's hard to come by those numbers, but it's the best I can tell.

There was a projection from NASA's inspector general office a few years ago, and it said through 2025, it was projecting total costs for the program of like 93 billion.

And that was just like so far, you know, I mean, every every launch of one of these big rockets like the one I'm looking at, it costs several billion dollars.

It's interesting.

You know, leading up to this, I would talk to people.

A lot of people just weren't even aware that NASA was working to putting people back on the moon, you know.

And then you have the fact that the majority of people alive today have been born after 1972.

Yeah.

There was never a time in their life when they looked up at the moon and thought, well, there's people there right now, you know.

But having said that, there was one recent poll that found that a majority of Americans did support the Artemis program.

And I was talking to one historian who pointed out that, you know, that poll suggests there was like more support for this program now than there was for Apollo back in the 1960s.

Wow.

I mean, there was a lot of enthusiasm around certain moments of the Apollo program.

Mm-hmm.

But, you know, support just kind of petered out.

Once the space race had been won, you know, they didn't want to spend all this money on it.

I mean, they were spending a lot more back then.

It was like 4% of the national budget compared to, you know, less than 1%, a fraction of a percent for NASA today.

I will say, though, there is a lot of bipartisan support in Congress.