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I realize Musk may have had little to do with much of it.  

I'm not sure what you mean there?  Love him or hate him, I think it would be a mistake to say anything other than when it comes to Space and rocket technology he's singlehanded transformed our world.  

I'm old enough to remember when conservatives hated Musk and thought he was a liberal, and liberals loved him.  Now we've come full circle.  

The big thing about Space exploration is that it's related to National Prestige.  What did going to the moon really give the United States that we didn't already have?  More than anything else, it proved to the world that our way of doing things was better.  If it had been Russia/USSR getting to the moon first, maybe a lot of countries would have to think about who best to model themselves after. 

It's related to national prestige? Or it WAS related to national prestige in the 1960s?

China has a very active Space program.  They've landed rovers on the Moon, and If I'm not mistaken they landed one on Mars. They've landed one on the far side of the moon (technically the moon doesn't have a dark side FWIW). 
They have plans to land a man (Taikonaut) on the moon before 2030.  They have an active space station, not as big as ISS but sizeable.  They have an assortment of rockets and heavy lift rockets.  Somebody on another forum posted up about China being the 2nd to land on the moon, and I had to point out they would be 7th, because we did it 6 times in 4 years.  It would have been 9 times if we simply flew the last two missions that were already built and had hardware for, and 10 if Apollo 13 hadn't failed. 

Do you think it's anywhere near as relevant as it was then? Do you think half the nerdy kids who might be interested in space exploration [and I was one of those] necessarily care in 2025 what country does it? Will they ascribe "this is the political system I should spend the rest of my life advocating for?" based on which one does something first?

Will someone think "OMG China is the best country in the world!!!" if they are first? Or will they roll their eyes and think that "national prestige" is just something those silly Boomers care about?

Anyways, I didn't mean to ramble on, I'm just really tuned into this stuff, and I have nothing to do with the space program, but I'm an interested observer.  

So, Artemis II will launch soon, and it will not even orbit the moon.  It will go on a free-return trajectory like Apollo 13 (after the incident).  It will still be stunningly cool, and there are 4 people aboard instead of the Apollo era 3 crew.  I'm sure there will be a lot of attention, and for good measure.  

The average person is probably expecting us to make a real moon landing soon, but it's probably a few years away.  The reason is because it took so long to develop SLS/Orion and so much money that there was not much money left over for the lander (HLS).  By the time they got around to awarding the lander, there were several contendors.  Old Space (Lockheed/Boeing and some others), Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos' company), a couple more, and Space X.  Space X was already developing Star Ship/SH, and they won the bid.  They were the furthest along, and they already had billions of their own money invested.  

Now, I'm sure you've seen the videos of SS/SH crashing, blowing up, and in general not doing too well.  It needs to be stated here that Elon Musk is simply not scared to push the envelope and fail.  These rockets they are sending up are purely iterations of each other, and they are being thrown together in a way that a production rocket never would.  But they are making progress, including landing the SH part of SS onto the tower.  

The hard part is and always will be re-using the upper stage, which in this case is the StarShip portion of the rocket.  They've been evolving the design for years, experimenting with tiles, different fin combinations, different engine strategies (hot staging!).  They're actually pretty close to being able to bring SS back, intact, and landing in back onto the launch tower.  They've had several controlled re-entry tests, and they're getting the heat shield dialed in.  The upper stage is so much harder to save, because it's going so much faster and takes so much more thermal abuse.  

Again, it's not well known or publicized by the press, but one "flaw" in the SS/SH concept is that once SS reaches space, it almost immediately will need to be refueled.  It's essentially empty.  You remember the giant external tank on the space shuttle?  We threw that away after every launch.  The main engines on the space shuttle were paperweights after tank separation.  The only fuel it had was it's little orbital maneuvering thrusters (OMS).  

Well, guess what....orbital refueling has never been done.  At least, nothing beyond small experiments.  What Space X plans is to land the SH rocket, refuel, mate it up and fly a new version of SS up called tanker.  They haven't really released very many details about this portion of the plan, but essentially I think there will be no humans, no cargo (other than fuel).  It's only job is to get a tank load of fuel into space, refuel the other SS, and come back.  And in order to do this enough to send SS to the moon or anywhere else, it needs to do it maybe a dozen or more times.  I've seen reports that it will take up to 16 tankers to fully fuel up starship.  

So as you can imagine, complex.  

As I said, I don’t know.

Now this part gets a little comical. Assuming SS can be successfully refueled, and get to lunar orbit, it’s supposed to dock with Orion during Artemis III.  There is something else called Gateway that is supposed to be a permanent moon orbiting space station. Ignore that, it’s vaporware. 

So Artemis III and SS are to dock in Lunar orbit, take the astronauts down to the surface, and after a stay, take off and bring them back to Orion, and then Orion comes back to Earth. 

If you have seen the size of Orion, it’s about 1/3 bigger than the Apollo CSM. Starship, in comparison, is massive. There is a joke somewhere about a flea f*cking an elephant, and that’s appropos. Starship will literally be 100x bigger than Orion. And this is just the pressurized volume. Physically, it will be much larger. 

So comically, Orion will “dock” with SS, they will transfer all crew into SS, with room for perhaps dozens of people but I guess there will only be 4. My current understanding is that Orion won’t need to be manned, so nobody will be left behind like Apollo. 

They take their little trip, return, redock with Orion, and return to earth in Orion. SS will also return to Earth, and possibly be refueled and landed, or maybe it will simply stay in orbit. They haven’t really said very much about that phase. 

Now you may be wondering…if SS can launch->go to moon—>land—>return to orbit—>return to earth—>land back on earth….why do we need SLS/Orion?  You’re not the only one. Now, one obstacle may be that it’s not yet “man rated”. NASA basically needs to put their stamp of approval on every rocket and system that is going to carry their astronauts. Obviously, this is for good reason, with fatal accidents on Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia. Space X has history with this, with Falcon 9 being man rated. I think they actually call it crew rated now, but whatever. 

He is that. I don't put a lot of faith in his technical skills, but he is absolutely the driver behind the vision. And he can secure the funds to back up the vision too.

Can I ask why you think that?  Do you think that narrative would still be pushed if he wasn’t so polarizing?  I heard the same thing from republicans when he was considered a liberal, and now I hear it from democrats now that he’s considered a conservative. 

It makes a bit more sense with respect to colonizing the Moon, which is bereft of heavier metals, like iron.  But for things like gold etc., yup, it would crash the markets.

And colonizing the Moon might make little sense.

Colonization of the moon is a joke. It will be nothing more than McMurdo station in Antarctica. 

I do have to mention that there is a couple of things on the moon that may have value. One is water, in the form of ice. The value comes from making this into rocket fuel. The gravity on the moon is 1/6 that of the earth.  So with the same fuel, you can launch 6 times the load. It’s why Apollo could launch the ascent stage of the LM with a little chicken shit rocket motor that was closer to the ejection seat of a fighter jet. In theory, you could create rocket fuel on the Moon, and launch a rocket to Mars, Much faster than you could from earth. It’s called a gravity well, Earths is high. Moon and Mars is not. 

The other thing on the moon is helium 3, which is supposed to be the fuel for fusion.  Fusion is always 30 years away, I don’t think it will be a factor.