The point of the study is to look beyond the budget and try to understand why the project succeeded. What was done right. You can apply most of the same lessons to high and low budget projects.
In fact it was a failure, like everything space related failed to deliver the promised ROI, either monetarily or in terms of quality of life.
Yeah, it turns out they were just useless rocks
The question of what benefits space program brought to humanity is old and well known, I'll only remind of one of it. The modern generation of space engineers and explorers was born and raised with the awe of the Apollo program achievements - of man setting foot on another celestial body for the first time. Statistically many people working on space developments came to the industry inspired by the spirit of Apollo.
I can only think of GPS and Sat TV but it's not like we could not find other ways to do it.
Namely some location system with Cell towers and sensors within cars and at the side of roads, and Sat TV well cable and terrestrial signal work just fine.
All the other stuff including the indirect benefits that people always love to cite could be easily achieved by throwing the same amount of money at basic research
At the end of the day this is about the very childish love for rockets, which is also very bizzarre considering that the odds of riding on one are so slim that you can only watch others doing it, also very unrewarding considering that you don't feel anything and you are trapped in a giant condom moving into the vacuum as opposed to a plane or a glider or a motorcycle or a bike where you can feel the feedback from the air and have a sense of relative movement due to stuff around you.
> I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
And got a 4x return on investment (we landed four men on the moon before 1970.)
And we did it because it was a hard thing to do.