A photo (because I couldn’t be bothered to scan it) of a page from a 1967 edition of “TRW Space Data,” recently arrived in my mailbox via eBay. Shown here are current (1967) and projected capabilities and costs of American launch vehicles. The Saturn V is noticeably cheaper on a dollars-per-pound basis than anything else, with the Titan IIIC and the Saturn Ib coming in behind it. For the future, hypothetical fully reusable vehicles were expected to greatly reduce those costs further, with a recoverable booster expected to run somewhere about $50/lb by 1970. The graph leads me to believe that the data was dated even at this point; Reference 3 mentioned in the graph was from 1961. Further, the Aerospace Plane was an ongoing project in ’61, but was long kaput by ’67.
$50 would be about $354 in todays money; the $540 for a pound of Saturn V payload would be $3825 today.
