As much of a fan of human spaceflight as I am, the Apollo program which made up the most notable part of the reaction to Sputnik was immensely wasteful and unnecessary.

You don’t even need to have a theoretical, they are doing that today with the race for a moon base with China. The Artemis program was our plan to get to one, most likely going to be located in a crater on the pole if they could find one with ice in it.

They are currently cutting funding and trying to cut what’s left after that too