Playing catch up was nothing new to NASA. If the Soviets had beat us to the moon, we would have probably gone to Mars. (I’m anxiously awaiting season 3 of For All Mankind.)
If Elon Musk is serious about colonizing Mars, with hundreds or even thousands of Starship flights to carry colonists and equipment, at that scale of operation it makes sense to extract oxygen for propellent from lunar regolith rather than shipping it all up from Earth. If you can refuel near the moon and then conduct what’s called an Oberth Maneuver, you get enormous economies over a direct flight.
Maybe; Nixon seems to have loathed the Apollo program and with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty it was no longer considered a national security issue. But at a minimum we probably would have retained production of Saturn rockets so the Soviet Union wouldn’t have a monopoly on the Moon.
Wasn’t that mostly because it had JFK’s brand stamped all over it? A Mars program would have let him beat the Soviets AND Kennedy.
A Mars expedition would have been at the absolute limits of what could be technologically achieved at something like 10x the cost of the entire Apollo program. No one had any experience with long-term weightlessness and even today we still don’t know if cosmic ray exposure can be kept acceptably low. And this at a time (early 1970s for program start) when winding up the Vietnam war and inflation were ravaging budgets. Unless we thought the Soviets were going to Mars we wouldn’t have bothered, and vice-versa.
This is technically true but requires a very close parsing of “on a moon mission” to be true. We lost Apollo astronauts during a fire in a launch test. They’re not that safe.
Rocket travel has only slightly less of a risk profile than summiting Everest. Single digit percentage catastrophic failure rates.
USA: We must put an object in orbit before the Russians, or all is lost!
USSR: Sputnik.
USA: We must put a man in orbit before the Russians, or all is lost!
USSR: Gagarin.
USA: We must launch a mission to the Moon before the Russians, or all is lost!
USSR: Luna-1.
USA: We must send a man to the Moon before the Russians, or all is lost!
USSR: N-1.
USA: Armstrong.
USA: See, that was the whole point of the Space Race all along, and now we won the only thing that actually matters, so we’ll just stop it there, now.