America used to do big things.

[Spider Jerusalem]

32. JFK didn't give a damn about the moon, you know.

He cared about beating the Soviets, for symbolic value, but going to the moon? Not so much:

President Kennedy: Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the
Moon ahead of the Russians.
James Webb: Why can’t it be tied to preeminence in space, which are your own….
President Kennedy: Because, by God, we keep, we’ve been telling everybody we’re
preeminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and
the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up, two or three times the
number of the Soviet Union…we’re ahead scientifically. It’s like that instrument you got
up at Stanford which is costing us a hundred and twenty-five million dollars and everybody
tells me that we’re the number one in the world. And what is it? I can’t think what it is.
Interruption from multiple unknown speakers: The linear accelerator.
President Kennedy: I’m sorry, that’s wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it!
James Webb: Let me say it slightly different. The advanced Saturn is eighty-five times as
powerful as the Atlas. Now we are building a tremendous giant rocket with an index number
of eighty-five if you give me Atlas one. Now, the Russians have had a booster that’ll lift
fourteen thousand pounds into orbit. They’ve been very efficient and capable in it. The
kinds of things I’m talking about that give you preeminence in space are what permits you
to make either that Russian booster or the advanced Saturn better than any other. A range
of progress possible it is so much different [unknown].
President Kennedy: The only…. We’re not going to settle the four hundred million this
morning. I want to take a look closely at what Dave Bell…. But I do think we ought get it,
you know, really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of
the Agency, and one of the two things, except for defense, the top priority of the United
States government. I think that that is the position we ought to take. Now, this may not
change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we
shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space. I think
it’s good; I think we ought to know about it; we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of
money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all
these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in
this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind,
as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.

http://history.nasa.gov/JFK-Webbconv/pages/transcript.pdf

The most justifiable reasons for a new Manhattan Project/Apollo Program in the present day? Mitigating climate change and developing fusion. Anything else is just more pointless dick-waving.