Really important step towards expanding our research on the moon, is creating highly detailed maps of the entire surface.
China is doing some great work on building out infrastructure and studies of the moon. They’re the only country that’s brought back any moon rocks in decades.
Space Race 3.0 is on, and we’ll see how different approaches to the research and manned missions will move forward.
The US is currently building out an extremely upfront cost heavy project, but with a lot of long term benefits.
China is building a more straightforward moon project, but with higher ongoing costs, as much of the infrastructure is disposable (more like Apollo).
I would argue that it’s a better world because Americans spent all that money. Those billion dollar rockets are how we learned to utilize space. In the process, we built gps, satellite communications, digital cameras and countless other technologies that the world enjoys today.
Without the space program we would never have had super soakers, and frankly, I didn’t want to live in a world like that.
*Super soakers were invented by a NASA engineer. It’s not hard to see how much a super soaker has in common with the fuel injection system for a pressure fed rocket, they’re essentially the same thing.
All that said, you’re not entirely wrong, throwing away rockets is a bit crazy. But we’ve come a long way in the field of reusable rockets. Within 3 years, I expect we will be putting a whole lot more in orbit at a much lower cost, because fully reusable rockets are nearly here.