By boosting domestic knowledge and talent in the creation of advanced materials and machinery such as turbopumps, knowledge of fuel injection technology, programming, and electronics

To explore water on the moon, you send a rocket to the moon. Think of the rocket as the top of a very tall pyramid. To build the rocket, you need to build expertise in a lot of different areas: both at the science level (physics, chemistry) but also at the engineering level (material science, fabrication technologies, fluid dynamics, software engineering, jet pump technology) etc etc..

You can think of these as lower levels of the pyramid that support the rocket at the top. Each of these require people to learn these things at a very high level. Local firms must learn to manufacture complex components at high tolerances, universities must produce graduates who are good enough to tackle these problems, government departments have to build the expertise to manage these projects. Forming even more of a broad base of the pyramid.

Once you have built the rocket, all this expertise doesn't just go away. All these trained people, and the processes and institutions that created those trained people, will not go away. They will go into other areas and solve other problems in a much better fashion than if they had not been trained such.

If you instead try to build a car instead, the pyramid will be much shorter, and the type of expertise required will be much less. The training processes will be worse. The spillover effects into the economy would be much less.

like how investing in computer science in the 80s helped? seriously what’s the objection when india spends a small fraction of its budget on space.