Depends on what the moon missions are. Building moon-specific infrastructure (ie adapting things to 14 day long light / dark cycles, 0.3g) would be a distractio

Depends on what the moon missions are. Building moon-specific infrastructure (ie adapting things to 14 day long light / dark cycles, 0.3g) would be a distraction. Using it as a close - by testing ground probably doesn't matter except it had the upside of possible getting people excited. For example, spacex wants to test the BFS. They could send it on a wide orbit 2 days away, or they could orbit around the moon instead. Going for the moon is probably only slightly different (ie different orbit insertion) but other than that it would be the same, except awesome pics/video.