[MichaelRo]

While I agree with the sentiment that sending manned missions to the Moon is kinda useless, unfortunately diverting those money to "noble purposes" is an utopia because that's not how things work.

In practice if those billions don't fund NASA programs they go into making some billionaires richer, Oracle laying off 30,000 people to fund data centers that will be obsolete by the time they are ready and similar stuff. Not a dime towards noble goals of humanity.

[palata]

Well NASA cut off on environment programs, I guess the money wouldn't have to go very far.

And to be fair, Artemis contributes to making some billionaires richer. Sending humans to space has always been a great PR stunt to convince the people that they should continue accepting that the taxpayer money gets used for space programs. Turns out that in 2026, space programs are more commercial and less about science. SpaceX is all about commercialising space and making... ahem... one billionaire richer.