Gorillas avoid fighting if they can. They instead thump their chests and bare their fangs. The Apollo program was a chest thumping and teeth baring program. It

Gorillas avoid fighting if they can. They instead thump their chests and bare their fangs. The Apollo program was a chest thumping and teeth baring program. It put a healthy fear of god in the Soviets, and lead to their ultimate defeat. Viewed as such it got a phenomenal bang for the buck. Otherwise, in terms of science, it was quite useless. The SLS program and the other heavy lift programs after Apollo (like the Space Shuttle) were primarily capability maintenance programs. If you look at them like that, then their success is not measured in how many launches they do, but in how few. If you see these programs as a capability maintenance programs, they succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dream: they maintained a large and competent workforce and ecosystem which allowed startups such SpaceX to develop and flourish. But now that SpaceX exists (and quite a number of other startups) there's less of a need a capability maintenance program. Given that, my prediction is that these astronauts that were paraded in front of us today will never fly to the Moon.