> Also, the economy was considerably smaller in those days, and so the Apollo program took up a much larger share of it.

Isn't that what adjusting to today's dollars essentially does? Those $28 billion were back then what $257 billion are in today's economy.

> Isn't that what adjusting to today's dollars essentially does?

To make it more obvious, a town council spending $1 million on a project is a much bigger undertaking (for them) than a country spending $1 million. It has nothing to do with inflation. I.e. consider it as percentage of GDP.

No. I think parent means that the economy was smaller in real terms. E.g. the population was lower.

I read somewhere that 400,000 people worked on the Apollo program.

Not quite:

The purchasing power of a dollar has grown ~8.5x over the past 60 years.

The US GDP has grown about 38x in that same time.

I've seen a lot of numbers, how about we go with Wiki's $156 and cut the difference?

And it doesn't matter what the rest of the economy was doing if we've converted it to today's numbers. The argument you were making was that government was intrinsically bloated, but from my view these private orgs are barely keeping up with 1960s .gov.

Since you're leaving off half the cost, it does make the government bloat look slimmer :-)