Just as bad, we have Johnson on tape selling it to Kennedy as a way to get past the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Kennedy didn’t believe in it at all.

Johnson wanted the pork for his constituents.

In Johnson’s defense a little, many of his constituents were quite poor and this did bring a lot of development to the area.

It also put the Soviet Union in a tough position of having to try to keep up (though they did have a stellar space program already, but going to the moon was a waste of resources).

Hell, IIRC, they had the first lander on the moon. They were well ahead of the US in many ways.