> The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it.

True, but if you're talking opportunity costs then I see Apollo, and the space race in general, as a great success story. They took the polotical atmosphere of nationalism, paranoia, one-upmanship, costly signalling, etc. and funnelled some of it into exploration, science and engineering at otherwise unthinkable levels.

It it weren't for the space race, it's likely the majority of those resources would be poured into armaments, military-industrial churn, espionage, corruption/lobbying, (proxy) wars, etc.

Reached Moon vs Had planet-destroying nuclear war.

Sounds like a bargain to me.

>If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money.

The problem with this type of attitude is that discovery doesn't work like this. Incremental improvements can sometimes work this way, but big discoveries do not. If there had been a mandate to "find a way to communicate without wires" I'm going to guess that it would not have gotten very far. Instead, this came about as a side effect of pure science research.

Going to the moon wasn't pure science research. Such research could have been an alternative use of those millions of man-hours of effort.

That said, I do take chriswarbo's point that it could have easily instead been even more baroque weapons or proxy wars, as well as yours and manaskarekar's about the uncertainty inherent in counterfactuals. I just wanted to make the point just finding some positives is not enough, you need to look at opportunity costs. If we both look at them and come to different conclusions, that's life, but at least we agree on the basis of measurement.

I somewhat agree with what you're saying, but eventually it's hard to prove if one way benefits us more than the other, because the benefits of the Apollo program perhaps influenced the space endeavors that improve our life today.

It's definitely debatable and hard to gauge. I just thought I'd throw in the link to show the other side of the argument.

My rule of thumb is that if a goal is thought to be technically possible (although it may have not been done before) and there are people who can execute and have the resources to execute it to any degree, it will probably be done. Especially regardless of anyone else opinion if they are not intimately involved in such processes.