Per crew, that should be fairly easy, $1B per 4 crew might be a bit harder.

Economics, might say bigger crew and staying longer, but fewer crew
and staying shorter is actually more economical for NASA.

Or a commercial enterprise is always going to try for bigger crew
[more passengers] and staying longer.
But NASA isn’t a commercial enterprise. NASA should be a non-commercial
enterprise, which is always attempting to assist US commerce and commerce in
general [in regard to space activities].

So, think NASA should focus on 1 or 2 crew, shorter time periods on the Moon
and more trips to Moon.
And similar with Manned Mars. Though a big advantage of the Moon as
compared to Mars is you do shorter trips, fewer crew and more trips.

Bob Clark

But enough Saturn V rockets were already built by the Johnson administration to continue the Apollo program well past Nixon’s first term in office. If Nixon wanted more, he could have had more built. And all kinds of post Apollo options were presented to him by NASA for the utilization of the Saturn V. But Nixon wouldn’t even use the last two Saturn V rockets he had available to him.

Marcel F. Williams

However, the one thing that’s changed is now there appears on the horizon a semi-viable, “commercial” proposal that’s nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than even the 2009 ULA “commercial” architecture. IF the NASA was ordered to forget about NEA’s and focus on the Moon for now, it would seem hard to argue against NOT availing themselves with surface missions for $1.5B each.

Sure, these would be simple, sample return missions leaving no lasting infrastructure, but what we need right now are scouting missions: these human missions would be cheap enough to serve the function of robotic precursor missions that have little political support–Decadal Survey doesn’t want to divert money to Lunar missions, and the HSF department doesn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on robots. For $3B/year, you could have two, high-quality, hand picked sample return missions per year.

I realize that “commercial space” is something of a misnomer; yet nevertheless these guys seem able to get things done for a lot less than people at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Politically, we could sell it as the only practical way to beat the Chinese back to the Moon! 😉

NASA has always had an internal war between those who felt that too much money is spent on manned space travel and too little has been spent on the robotic exploration of space. However, I think it is clear that NASA’s greatest glory since the end of the Apollo era has been its robotic exploration of space. NASA has sent robots to the surface of Mars, probes to the outer planets, and spectacular observations of the universe have been made from the Hubble telescope. There is simply no private or public space organization that even comes close to what NASA has accomplished in space over the past 40 years with its unmanned machines. Its simply astonishing!

But since the end of Apollo, NASA’s manned space program has simply been a make-work program for astronauts: mere symbols of NASA’s former era of manned space pioneering.

As the new era of private commercial manned space programs rapidly approaches there are now many libertarians who believe that NASA really shouldn’t have a manned space program at all!

But a public manned space program has a totally different agenda than private profit based commercial space programs. So there is no need for one to eliminate the other since both private and public space programs are mutually beneficial to each other.

Marcel F. Williams

Well, I could agree with this.
But this does not change political leadership, it gives the job of NASA executives to a body which could possibly be more trustworthy.
And/or perhaps such a body could be more objective.

Though no guarantees on either of those points.
And one could say one of the main purposes of NASA is to be such a body.

I would say a fundamental aspect of NASA is to help political leaders steer a path in a potential future which may involves opening the space frontier.

We could replace NASA. Or give NASA some competition in this task- at least we might get some oppositional viewpoints.
This might reduce NASA lying [yes, spinning is kinder term] to Congress by some amount.

But no doubt some could make the argument that money would corrupt it [or dingbats will corrupt it] but I would say power and distraction from purpose [the normal things] is a better explanation- but not the only problem, or major problem

One could do things which could be as successful or better in terms of re-organizing NASA.
But, there nothing stopping NASA from getting it’s act together- other than it’s executives.

But maybe all that’s needed is firing some executives who are slightly
more socialist than average, and then focus on starting markets in space.

If it did, would NASA do any better this time than they did last time?