Of course in the 1960s, we put about 0.35% of GNP into the space program for a couple of years. That'd be about $40 billion/year with the size of our economy now. Nearly $20 billion if you just adjust for inflation. That's Apollo only; I suspect some other lines in the NASA or DoD budget also helped out the program.

In contrast, the current Moon initiative is getting $10 bil/year, and much less than that the first few years, for a target of 4 guys on the Moon for 7 days in 2018. Apollo also got all sorts of waivers to regulations, and we were much more willing to see someone killed, since it was seen as an element of national security policy.

Of course, there's also the scandal of losing so much of the Apollo knowledge base -- throwing out blueprints, technical reports, etc. That's not the fault of the current leadership, but I do wonder how much it'd have helped if NASA had made a concious effort in the 1970s to provide as much of a base as possible to future Moon efforts vs trying hard to forget and move on to Shuttle.

I'm not saying there's anything impressive about the proposed schedule, but, it isn't exactly fair to compare it to Apollo.