This comment is an invitation to an uninformative comparison. Apollo was just barely able to take a crew to the moon and back, with many expendable stages, using 5% of US GDP to do it. Almost all the value in Apollo is indirect value in the form of technologies developed for Apollo.

Why replicate that? Indeed we should ask: Is there a goal to value, other than the obvious "the Chinese would get there first if we don't?"

A lunar "base" would just be a vastly more expensive ISS. We will discover that lunar regolith is a bigger nuisance than floating boogers in the ISS.