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.