I'm not denying that Apollo eventually produced a lot of good stuff.
But we also have the benefit of hindsight to analyse the history of the US space programme and see what was done well and what was done badly.
When you look at the cost breakdown for the Apollo programme below, you can see that much of that spending was on lots of missions in the name of prestige. But the actual mission objectives were pretty pointless, because the output was a bunch of moon rocks. And you don't actually need or want manned missions to do that exploration, because unmanned is better.
So you can foresee at the beginning that much of the Apollo spending is completely unnecessary if you only want to develop the technology. That is why I say Apollo spending was inefficient.
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The unlimited resources available for the Apollo programme, arguably led to the subsequent style of project definition and execution, with gold-plated requirements and little thought as to commercial viability.
After Apollo, the US settled on a manned Space Shuttle programme and a manned ISS, again in the name of prestige, rather than focusing solely on driving down launch costs with unmanned rockets.
So did the Apollo missions (by being manned and a rush job) impede the overall development of a low-cost launch industry in the USA by decades? It's only now that we see a SpaceX emerge
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