If I hear the spinoff argument one more time, I'm going to gag. That's all a Panglossian argument that there was no other better way to have spent the money.

In any case, several of Etzioni's arguments were clearly NOT thinking about tight closed black boxes. Here are three:

> It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science at the cost of weakening our efforts in other scientific endeavors. ...

> We would fall behind in other sciences because of our dedication to putting men on the moon. ...

> the space race is used as an escape, by focusing on the moon we delay facing ourselves

The quote from the LA Sentinel flips your black box argument around, pointing out the benefits come with a people cost:

> .. argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)."

The linked-to M.A. thesis has more direct quotes, like protestors who want some of the money diverted from the space program to feed some tens of thousands of people who don't have adequate food, nor comfortable homes from which to watch the Moon landing.

These are issues we still delay facing.