Being the first to land on the moon was never intended to be cheap. So many things had to be invented simply to get there.
Just imagine how economical space flight would be if all of that 1960s technology had been incrementally improved on for efficiency, manufacturing ease, and scale instead of a lot of it being almost literallly mothballed.
There was never any reason to spend that kind of money. It was worth going to the moon once to see what was there, but I have yet to see anybody articulate a reason to go back that doesn't rely on soaring rhetoric and implausible money-making schemes.
Rare-earth minerals aren't actually rare. The name comes from the relatively low concentrations in which you find them naturally. But we won't run out; they're just more expensive to refine as we tap lower concentration sources. Even poor sources are going to yeild minerals at a cost that's a few orders of magnitude less than a what you'd get on the moon.
Yeah, why did they build computers so big and expensive and slow in the WWII? They could have waited for a Skylake Intel, and it would be not only better, but also cheaper...
