The fact that NASA went to the moon in 1969 was interesting, exciting, and fun. I remember where I was that day. At the dentist, with a portable tv from home, and when we put it in back the trunk of our car, we smashed the rabbit-ears antenna that we forgot to fold down before we shut the trunk lid.
That said, the question isn't "was it cool?" or even "was it worth it?" It's "what if Apollo never happened?
Most of us agree that it was cool. Was the expenditure to get a man on the moon worth it? Let's say it cost 40 billion 1970 dollars, which is like 100 billion today dollars (that's not exact, but in the ballpark). Was it that much money's worth of cool? Hard to say, but that's not really important to the "what if" question. And I bet if Apollo were a new project today, it would cost a trillion dollars. Especially considering that it cost the USA 15 billion dollars to reroute 10 miles of highway under Boston.
People who are saying that we wouldn't have the internet or tang or teflon are mistaken, because the moon money might have been spent on other science projects. As it was, the space program was allied with the techno-military-industrial complex already, so other innovation would have happened even without a moonshot.
I'm not a moon landing hoax person, but I know enough about science to understand that the cost of doing stuff on the moon and especially on distant celestial bodies, because of the distances and the hostile environments, makes it all rather impractical. Doing stuff in weightlessness, sure. In geosynchronous earth orbit, sure. On the moon? Maybe. But sending people to Mars or Jupiter or Alpha Centauri is more of a sucker's bet.
