NASA isn't expensive. The science parts and the job creation parts almost certainly return a significant economic multiplier. The spend is very good value for around 0.5% of the federal budget.

That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.

Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.

Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.

They could be front and centre, but they're not.

I would like to watch a new Moon landing, but in my opinion more useful would be to build a space station with artificial gravity.

At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.

Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.

So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.

For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.

While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.

That’s a very fair point. Frankly I don’t know enough about the Artemis mission and general path, and would like to learn more. I’m certainly open to the argument that NASA’s budget isn’t properly allocated to the right priorities. I was responding just to the classic argument of “why spend money on NASA when we could be spending on …”