Most of the significance of the moon landing seems to be based on the presumption that someday we're going to get to Star Trek. The fact that there's a plaque on a worthless pile of rocks on the other hand, is totally worth the more tangibly useful things we could have been doing with that money. I've lived my whole life without drinking Tang, and Velcro sneakers were annoying by the time I was ten. The whole thing was conceived as a propaganda stunt by a failed president who somehow thought we needed some sort of evidence of our superiority to the manifestly incompetent Soviet Union. As if beating them to the city-incinerating-and-irradiating bomb by almost a decade was not enough , somehow the government and a bunch of math nerds managed to convince the country that we had something to prove to a bunch of thugs from the historical backwater of Europe. The beauty of the free market was that if the general public had a genuine need for an orbital beeping device, we'd have produced one long before. Instead, a government whose main skills were lying and spying dictated that the true measure of accomplishment was being first to achieve an arbitrary goal no one else had been working on to that point, and suckered their archrivals into agreeing to play the contest on their terms. This is what happens when you elect a president from the party that recognized the USSR in the first place.

I am pretty sure we did not need to focus all that effort, talent and money to come back with a confirmation of the "not green cheese hypothesis." It's kind of significant that the most famous and popular movie about the moon program is the one about the mission that utterly failed to land on the moon.