Sputnik, 50 Years Later: Race to the Moon

Escalating shuttle and station costs, combined with relatively flat government spending for NASA, already has pushed back the debut flight of the shuttle replacement vehicle from 2014 to 2015. So far, NASA is sticking with its 2020 deadline for returning U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface.

Budget Crunch

Money for the predecessor Apollo program simply was not an issue.

"No one seemed concerned either about the difficulty or about the expense at the time. Congressional debate was perfunctory and NASA found itself literally pressing to expend the funds committed to it during the early 1960s," wrote former NASA historian Roger Launius in Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis.

At its peak, NASA received more than 5 percent of the federal budget in 1965, an amount comparable to more than $65 billion in 1992 dollars, according to Launius. NASA receives about one-quarter of that amount today, less than 1 percent of the annual budget.

"Our moon program isn't funded to succeed," said Joan Johnson-Freese, who chairs the Department of National Security Studies at the Naval War College in Rhode Island.

"If we're really going to go to the moon we're going to have to put the money in pretty quickly," Johnson-Freese said in an interview with Discovery News. "All along, people have been wondering if this vision to go to the moon is more fantasy than anything else. Right now our space 'vision' just doesn't have a matching budget."

Johnson-Freese echoes the NASA's chief's sentiment that the United States could find a welcoming committee if and when it returns to the lunar surface.

China has the ability to impose its political will, she said. "They don't need to fund Social Security or Veterans Affairs. Their government isn't accountable to a democratically elected Congress."