Admiral Shepard's unequivocal answer to the title question is: Yes, it was worth

the effort to send men to the Moon. Does that mean we should go back to the Moon again, or try to go on to Mars? Not yet, he says, given what else we might do with finite resources, and given how much of the data brought back we still have not assimilated. This is not the most exciting show, but Admiral Shepard has thought deeply and speaks engagingly on matters such as what, apart from the human spirit, space exploration is good for. AS: "I think that the recent Skylab mission, which was supposed to be 28 days of blissful experiments and turned out to be 28 days of a cliffhanger, probably demonstrated as graphically as any of us could how well man can function in space--not only the crew but those men on the Earth who are responding to the various emergencies that come up."