NASA's budget allocation 1970-1979, by category

This graph shows how NASA distributed their budget in the years between 1970 and 1979. Although NASA's terminology for their categories changed in 1976, we can see that Spaceflight was the greatest area of investment in the 1970s.

NASA's focus in the 70s

With the achievements made by the Apollo Program and after the final manned moon landing in 1972 made by Apollo 17, NASA then turned its focus to other projects. One of which was the already established Skylab space station. This was the first space station to be built by the US, and was launched into orbit in 1973, where it stayed until 1979. Another was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which was the first joint US-Soviet space mission, in which spacecrafts from both nations docked with one-another, symbolically marking the end of the space race. It is estimated that the Skylab and Apollo Soyuz projects cost 2.2 billion and 245 million U.S dollars respectively.

Space Shuttle Program lifts off

Towards the end of the 1970s, and for most of the 1980s, the Space Shuttle Program became the primary focus of NASA. The objective was to transport astronauts and cargo into orbit regularly, and it lasted from 1972 to 2011, with the first flight coming in 1977 and the first manned flight taking place in 1981. The program lasted for almost thirty years and was responsible for transporting over 300 astronauts into space. NASA's budget is broken down into departments, therefore we do not have the annual costs of each individual mission or program, although the Space Shuttle Program is estimated to have cost almost 200 billion U.S dollars in its thirty-year existence.