you know, i was going to argue against but you have convinced me otherwise.

The moon landing was a waist of resources. It has not benefit man in anyway shape or form. With that being said it was pretty "bad ass"

i think you guys completely forgot the context of the cold war and the reasons behind the huge budgets deployed...

Anyway :

Most badass moment in US history : nuclear bombs on Japan

Most badass moment in world history : nazi extermination programme

Landing a man on the moon is a nice moment, full of illusions, in the mean time it hasn't shaped our conscience the way those two things did. To prove my point : science is only a big part of the budget when war is around - in other words it is still secondary to war

It has had a lot of positive impact even though I agree with you it was a waste of ressources.

Fundamental research doesn't need to deploy a rocket with a few trained personnel to contribute to science, too bad research is not as sexy as it's applications. Seems like human beings still prefer the fireworks to the chemistry behind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

The politics behind the Moon landing are irrelevant to the appeal of it. The political ramifications of the event were the farthest thing from the minds of most of the people watching, awestruck, all around the world. For most, it represented one giant leap for mankind, not one giant nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union. In the grand scheme of things, on the scale of the Universe, another petty war fought for a miniscule period of time is nothing. The Moon landing was the culmination of billions of years of Earth's development, hundreds of millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of technological advancements and scientific understanding. Our battle was not against another short-lived human, but one of the fundamental laws of nature that has been in place since the beginning of the Universe. Men have gained and lost power, empires risen and fallen many times in our history, but on that night in 1969, we unbound ourselves from the planet on which every war and struggle in human history was fought, on which every human being has been born and died. Everything that has ever happened to any human being has occurred on or in the air around Earth until that moment. I could go on.

The moon landings were never meant to be profitable. Their main purpose was entirely ideological, there's a reason the Apollo programme is often described as the most expensive propaganda programme in history. And it worked, the moon landings were a turning point in the battle for world sympathy of the two rivaling systems (american "capitalism" vs. soviet "communism")

So Apollo may have been expensive and never really profitable, but the opportunity costs of not being the first on the moon would have been much higher.

Is this a joke? Even if it is, it's a terribly distasteful joke.

*Cough* Yuri Gagarin

*Cough* Did not set foot on the moon or even escape Earth's orbit. A monkey and a dog have done what he has.