Astronauts’ Salaries

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32037, 11 July 1969, Page 11

Astronauts’ Salaries

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It has cost the United States almost $U524,000 million to give Mr Neil Armstrong a chance to walk on the moon for two hours and 40 minutes. And while he is doing it, America’s first civilian astronaut will be earning only about SUS 33 (orsNZ29i) during that time.

SUS24,OOOm for its space flight programme since it was begun 10 years ago; the money has been spent on equipment, salaries, construction and training in a massive national effort to make the first man on the moon an American. Mr Armstrong, the highestpaid of the flying astronauts, receives $U527,401 (about $NZ24,463) a year. Based on a 40-hour week —although he usually works longer than that—the Apollo 11 commander will receive 5U532.92 for his time on the moon. If he had to pay for the space suit he will be wearing, it would cost him almost 12 years salary; his complete lunar surface outfit cost about SUS3OO,OOO. The two other Apollo 11 astronauts are United States Air Force officers, and receive only what flying officers of their rank would receive doing any other job. Colonel Edwin Aldrin receives 5U518,622.55 (about 5NZ17.074) a year, including base pay, quarters and subsistence allowance, and flying pay. Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Collins’s pay is $U517,147.76 (about 5NZ15.312) a year, including similar fringe benefits.

The Apollo 11 mission itself is costing the N.A.S.A. SUS3SOm, including SUSSSm fdr the command module, SUS4Im for the lunar module, and SUSIBSm for the Saturn 5 launch booster. Putting men on the moon has been expensive in another way, too. Eight American astronauts have lost their lives since the space programme began 10 years ago. Three of them, Virgil Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Edward White, died in a spacecraft The trio were burned to death in January, 1967, when a fire, feeding on pure oxygen atmosphere, flashed through an Apollo command module while they were in training on a launch pad at Cape Kennedy. Four astronauts lost their lives in aircraft crashes while I flying between the far-flung

N.A.S.A. establishments. Charles Bassett and Elliot See died in February, 1966, when their two-seater jet aircraft crashed on landing at St Louis, Missouri; Theodore Freeman was killed in October, 1964, when his plane crashed near Houston after colliding with a goose; and Clifton Williams died in October, 1967, when his went out of control and crashed into a hilltop near the FloridaGeorgia border. Another astronaut, Edward Givens, died in a Houston road accident in June, 1967. Only one man, however, is known to have died during a space flight. He was the Russian cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who was killed in April, 1967, when the parachute on his spaceship failed as the craft returned to earth. He was the first Russian to go into space twice.