Why would we aim for the moon instead of aiming anywhere but the moon?

I guess it is where it is close, and I don't really care too much about it. I like Bezos idea of space rather than Musk's: use Moon as a production base or something, let's move the bad stuffs pollution, garbage, nuclear waste) to the moon.

What I mean is: if we're sending undesirable things like garbage into space, why do we want it on the Moon? Why not just launch it out of the solar system, or into the Sun? There doesn't seem to be a good reason to favor putting it on the Moon.

From the article:

> Energetically, it costs less to shoot your payload out of the Solar System (from a positive gravity assist with planets like Jupiter) than it does to shoot your payload into the Sun.

This is kind of my point regarding the Moon. It's harder to hit the Moon than to miss it, so why aim for it?

Once you get into an orbit of the Earth, you are "halfway to anywhere" [1] in terms of fuel costs. Getting out of the Earth's gravity well is the hard part, once you're up there you might as well put the trash much further away than the moon. Especially because if we're shipping trash, we can just set and forget it on a trajectory to the dump site, we don't need to worry about it taking a long time or to land safely.

[1]https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php

You can send 50kg of garbage into orbit for $300k with SpaceX. I don't think sending it to the moon would be any more cost efficient (quite the opposite). Plus with the kind of garbage where you might find that cost acceptable (long-term radioactive waste, extreme biohazards) those are the kind of stuff you don't want to have to end up detonating in the air if the rocket malfunctions.