@mandlebro @dave The Official story, which I’ve heard for decades and for that matter bought one, is that the Fisher Space Pen NASA eventually started using was an entirely private effort that cost only “$1 million” which would be $10 million in today’s dollars, but that sort of money was easier to come by in the early-mid 1960s.

Wikipedia claims NASA did try to create one but stopped after cost overruns. As the above BLS inflation calculate would indicate, $165 million back then would be ~$1.65 billion in today’s dollars. Unlikely, when per Brave AI the whole Apollo program costs about $25.8 billion, and $300-450 million per launch for Apollo 7 through 17 which sounds about right per my memory (and I was watching the whole thing in real time starting with one or more of later Gemini missions, it was to me the most exciting happening back then).

At that time NASA wasn’t purely a public works program and wasn’t that dumb, plus Congressional oversight was always an issue. They were partly a public works org from the beginning, a big reason LBJ was such a booster of it, it an explicit mission to uplift the South and after JFK’s death the space flight center moved from next to MIT (lots of cleared space to its north/northeast still there in the late 1970s) to Huston. After Apollo 17, outside of space science missions it became the sad joke we know it as today.