I would actually pose this question another way. Absent the obvious political reasons (Cold War), did we go to the moon too early? The Apollo program was a comb

I would actually pose this question another way. Absent the obvious political reasons (Cold War), did we go to the moon too early? The Apollo program was a combination of bleeding edge innovation (some of the first uses of transistors) and brute force (massive industrial efforts, orbital math using paper and slide rules). Suppose that never happened. Suppose we had ICBMs and satellites but never felt the need to go to the moon or even develop human spaceflight. If we were to spin up a new space program today, we would be missing decades of human spaceflight knowledge, BUT we would have the advantage of modern robotics, aerodynamic modeling software, 3d printing, and everything else. For that matter, we might have been able to go to Mars in the 80s if we were willing to "brute force" the problem (see von Braun's books). But maybe the smart move is/was to invest in other areas instead and wait for the progression of technology to make such endeavors more affordable, and by extension, sustainable instead of being a one-off novelty project like Apollo. On the other hand, history doesn't exist in a vacuum. As expensive as they were, I think Apollo and the Shuttle got multiple generations interested in space; not just science fiction but the pairing of imagination with reality, so it's impossible to predict where the public (or even billionaire-class) excitement about space would have be without them.