ok.....IF we faked going to the moon......why did we fake going back? We already knew it wasn't made out of cheese, so we didn't go back to replenish our supplies. I have an idea.....let's write to nasa and get the coordinates of the lunar landings. No atmosphere, no wind, no erosion. So even if all of our launch platforms, moon buggies and flags were hit by meteors, logic would dictate that we would find some debris. Let's go to a huge telescope and take a look.
I think we went. I also think we went back. Even if we faked going once.....we won. There was no need to keep faking it. I remember watching the apollo 17 launch in 1970. I was very young....but i remember sitting on my uncle's lap, and him trying to explain to a four year old why this was so important. I just thought it was neat to watch.
Going to the moon is a good thing, no matter how young our space program is, relatively speaking.
And if it was just "because we could" why did we bother with the scientific equipment to study it? why not a bottle of jack daniels? Yes we pushed ourselves because we were racing against the russians, but think about it. we were already downtrodden because of the vietnam era, the american people needed something to be proud of. And as far as it goes, everything up to that point had been geared toward getting us there. All the way back to the gemini missions. We didn't just decide....he we can go to the moon, let's go....we went in small steps, same as the russians were doing. Are you also saying that the reasons they launched sputnik were wrong as well? The only reason they launched it when they did was because we were getting ready to launch a satellite. They wanted to beat us in that, so was it wrong? Take a good hard look at the good that came from that.