But we've never gone back, and now we know a) it can be done and b) how to do it.
If it was never done as (an incredibly expensive) show-off project, would it ever have been done? We are struggling desperately to keep the ISS going today, and its science return is probably not worth the cost.
I know I'll lose my train of thought in what is to follow, but try to extrapolate from the rambling.
What I like to label "The Death of the Future", which is that whole no vision, have a probe do it NASA which hasn't returned to the Moon and will give up on manned space ventures at all if the current budget passes (anyway...), came about largely due to a number of outside factors playing on Space ventures. Most importantly, you had Johnson break the camel's back with trying to spend on both Vietnam and the Great Society simultaneously, which killed the economy. Because of that, future Saturn V production was canceled, and Nixon went for the Shuttle rather than anything like a Mars mission or Venusian/Martian manned flybys or what have you. The shuttle basically set NASA on the course away from the great adventurous frontiers, so to speak. Space activities which were manned (the ones people actually care about) stayed in LEO since that's all the shuttle was capable of really, and everything else was done by probes and robots. So manned spaceflight was stifled, and the great things that came really were done by probes (problem is, that's really damn boring and doesn't inspire. It's in our nature to need to go places ourselves. Think if the Europeans, in a hypothetical, had been able to and did send probes to the Americas rather than going there and exploring themselves).
So the modern malaise with Space has come about due to Shuttle age lack of vision and grand direction, and I will fight tooth and nail for those who say space exploration was a fluke. It wasn't. While the race with the Soviets may have sparked it, there was a lot, and still is a lot, to keep it going. The NASA of the past had grand visions, which included a second run of the Saturn V, continued exploration of the Moon and lunar bases in the 1970's, Venusian and Martian manned flybys, space stations (there were to be far, far more Spacelabs before it was limited down to just the one), and a Mars landing, all of which would have inspired the public and rightly so. The NASA that came to be due to a broken economy and cut backs was one limited to probes and LEO, all of which don't inspire and rightly so.
It doesn't need to be a show off project to be done. It was, and still is, a frontier of science, a potential source of habitation, and a hot bed of resources (many of which are not on earth in high levels as on the Moon; helium-3, for example).
And we actually have forgotten how to do it, which is why we need new rockets. Through the spectre of time, we have pretty much forgotten how to build Saturn V's due to changing technology. The rocket may have had a computer as advanced as a modern calculator, but it could get things done. The problem is that modern engineers know so much that they're "too smart" to know how to build a rocket based on the old blueprints, so we have to reinvent the wheel.
Anyway, there is a need to go do these things, both in the need to science to know and of man to go where he has not yet gone. So whether in 1980, 1990, 2000 or 2030, man will land on the moon.
Now, in a delayed space race environment, I suspect space innovations to still come into being, but more slowly, with a Space Race sparking off rapid innovation and development when it comes along later, by which point the moon (if not already landed upon) will see a manned mission at some point shortly after.
Where was satellite technology key to development of the internet? References?
Satellites were going to be big regardless (communications, spying) and are rather cheaper than putting people on the moon. And if even a fraction of what was spent on Apollo had been spent on primary research, we might be more technologically advanced than we are now.
Personally, I suspect that if the US had got a satellite into orbit first, the space race would never have taken off - the propaganda benefits of being "number two" wouldn't have been that great for the USSR, and it takes two to make a race. Once it was clear the US was going to get to the Moon first, the USSR pretty much dropped out.
Bruce
I don't recall the article. Look up "What if no space race" in google and you may run across it, but you'll run into a wall of reports about Constellation in the way.