No. It gave Ronald Reagan the club that he needed to beat the USSR with.
"......Some view the Apollo Moon landings solely as a “stunt” – a demonstration of American technological prowess. In this view, the lunar landings achieved little except for global public relations. While this aspect of the program is true, it certainly is not the entire story. The real value of Apollo was that it demonstrated to the Soviets both our technical abilities and our national resolve. A human lunar mission is an enormously difficult technical undertaking, something that the Soviets themselves had seriously attempted and failed to accomplish. That failure, underscored by America’s success, led the Soviets (and other aggressive regimes) to conclude that Americans could achieve any technological goal that they set as their goal. A decade later, to defend America and our allies against nuclear annihilation, President Ronald Reagan announced an effort to develop a shield in space. Many of the same American intelligentsia who thought Apollo to be “silly” loudly proclaimed the idea of a ballistic missile defense system as ludicrous and unworkable, calling it “Star Wars” and labeling Reagan an out-of-control “foreign policy cowboy.” However, the Soviets took “Star Wars” development very seriously. In fact, an opportunity for a major breakthrough in nuclear arms control was missed at the Reykjavik summit in 1986 solely because Reagan would not trade away SDI for a proposed elimination of Soviet nuclear missiles. With prospects of Reagan’s “Star Wars” neutralizing their nuclear arsenal, the Soviets commenced on a self-imposed race to develop their own missile defense system, which in turn sped up their nation’s eventual fall into financial collapse.
Why would the Soviets have insisted on such a provision at Reykjavik if SDI were merely some cowboy fantasy? Tribbe completely misses this concrete, substantive benefit of Apollo – American technical credibility and the power it wielded. In his mind, although the Apollo “stunt” was successful, it had no lasting effect on the state of the Cold War and even less effect on long-term spaceflight (to which it was only incidentally relevant). In fairness, this is a common perception in the current academic community; I simply find it a pity that someone who has studied this period so intently could miss a development of such an obvious significance......" Source
The original space program....saying since Sputnik launched....we needed to compete, and we had to have a guy on the moon by the end of the decade....was a gimmick. I agree, there’s tons of technology gained from the episode, and things we have today only because the program jump-started technology development across the US. But it’s all because we engaged in a totally different direction out of the early 1960s, via a gimmick.
As for Reagan’s Star Wars? He brought the right people into the room, who laid out enough of a project that would require massive gov’t funding, with the end-result being the Soviets being out-bluffed at the poker table, and figuring they’d maxed out on military spending. He was right...thus ending the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and first-world status of USSR. The value of the gimmick did pay off, in this regard, I agree.
I think in the long term....this single episode opens the door for people to continually ask now...am I stupid enough to believe this Senator, this President, or even this TV news commentator? The President got his successful gimmick because he rode the news media wave all the way onto the beach, with a really nice-looking surfboard. At this point, there’s nothing much to believe in anything he says, period. He’s beyond lame-duck status. We might even have to invent a totally new word to fit a guy in this position.