Right! Even taking "return" very literally, the lunar rock samples brought back are incredibly valuable to science. And the spinoff/technological stimulus value of the program is even harder to quantify--consider that during one year, Project Apollo purchased >60% of U.S. semiconductor production. This was a critical early market for Fairchild Semiconductor, e.g. [1]

[1]:https://books.google.com/books?id=gXYItzQARVoC&pg=PA127&lpg=...