Not to be mean but you have no background in manufacturing or not much experience with factories. Factories are expensive and experienced workers are important. You can’t stop a factory for a year or two and then just start it back up with ease. There are costs associated with keeping a factory on idle and it takes time and money to rehire the workers.

When they suspended production they likely lay off workers (who went on to find different jobs) or reassigned workers elsewhere. Tooling and machinery also does not like to sit around (i.e. it needs cleaning and maintenance and improper storage could led to damage) not to mention the space it takes up(which the company could use for other purposes).

When an auto company lays off odds are the factory that produces the car is not going into total shutdown. It is either retooling to make a new model (or a different model) OR reducing shifts (i.e. instead of 3 eight hour shifts there will be 2 ten hour shifts or 1eight hour shift). Only when they close the factory will they lay everyone off, but factories that close rarely reopen.

Once you suspend production of the Saturn V, then almost everyone in the factories where it was assembled would be out of a job and the factory itself turned over to different purposes.

This is why Heavy lift is often so dang expensive. You must keep the facilities running or else lose the capability. This is also why things like Falcon Heavy or Delta Heavy are much more efficient than a monolithic booster like Saturn V. You can keep them in production without needing to drain NASA’s limited budget.

“As any employee of General Motors knows all too well.”

Which means what exactly? All you’ve done is blurted out a name. Show how your example is relevant.

For all practical purposes, “suspended” means that the production lines are shut down, which is the same end result as “termination” – nothing is being built. It would have been a different story if they had slowed down the production lines (i.e. a stretch-out), but they didn’t. You sound like a politician trying to parse words.

As to the value of an unused Saturn V, as I have already shown, the extras would only be valued at the cost of manufacture. To put their production value into perspective, an empty Saturn V weighs about as much as an empty 747, but a 747 is far more complex, so while a Saturn V looks big, aluminum cans are not that expensive to build compared to sophisticated aircraft.

Also, while one big lawn ornament may impress you, apparently you’ve never seen the boneyards of Mojave or Tucson – now there is money lying around!

Your obsession for all things Apollo blinds you to reality.

Uh, yep. Now run along and play

Except there is.

As any employee of General Motors knows all too well. You’re just crankin’ to crank.

The goal of the Apollo program was accomplished when Apollo 11 returned safely, so Apollo 12 and beyond were just bonus – backups in case they were needed.

Exactly.

I’m currently reading a book on the history of Skylab. Its origins were in a realization at Huntsville in the mid-1960s that, once boots were on the Moon, the massive layoffs would begin. They cast about looking for a new make-work project to give everyone something to do, and came up with the idea of a space station.

For a long time, the project floundered because these engineers were interested only in self-preservation, not in any actual science. It took them a long time to ask scientists for some legitimate research that could be done in microgravity, and even then the scientists had little faith in the engineers because they were more interested in building the beast to save their jobs rather than actually accommodating science.

So to claim that a decision was suddenly made in the late 1960s to cancel Apollo, a decision that blind-sided everyone, is simply factually untrue. The pendulum for JFK’s end-of-decade clock swung both ways. Boots on the Moon by 1970 — but nothing was ever said about after that.

We’ve spent more than 40 years trying to figure out what to do with this massive government infrastructure built to perform a publicity stunt. We still don’t have the answer.

“LBJ suspended S-V production.”

Tomato, tomahto. In manufacturing there is not much of a difference between “closed down” and “suspended”. Other than the disposition of tooling, you still end up either reassigning the workers or letting them go.

“So they’re (unused Saturn V) the most expensive lawn ornaments ever produced.”

Nope. The real cost of any extra Saturn V’s is just the cost of manufacturing (not much compared to the development costs), since the full-up costs were born with Apollo 11. You forget what Kennedy’s goal was:

“I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

The goal of the Apollo program was accomplished when Apollo 11 returned safely, so Apollo 12 and beyond were just bonus – backups in case they were needed.

Why the Apollo program was terminated after Apollo 17 can most likely be attributed to the same reason we haven’t gone back in 40 years – the Moon is an interesting place to visit, but not worth the huge expense without some sort of “National Imperative” driving the need. And there isn’t any.

Even the notional goal of going to Mars is clearer to the public (another place for humans to live), but it’s still not a significant factor when the costs are compared to paying down the national debt, health care, military spending, national parks, etc., etc. Short of a big asteroid scare, NASA will have to live within it’s current budget profile and be happy that it isn’t being cut as much as other federal agencies.

Hence the need to cut unnecessary programs like the SLS, which WILL produce the most expensive lawn ornaments ever produced unless cancelled soon.