A military-scale NASA budget builds a lunar base

What could NASA do with a budget comparable to US military spending?

It could plausibly establish a permanent lunar base and a Mars program, especially if the space race continued long enough to make a Moon station politically difficult to abandon.

A NASA budget on the scale of US military spending is used to imagine permanent stations on the Moon and Mars. Continued competition after the first lunar landing could have pushed the United States or Soviet Union to establish a base that later became international. Once crews, power, water, and resupply systems existed on the Moon, abandoning them would become politically and institutionally difficult. The answer treats the missing lunar base as a lost opportunity for scientific work and the long-term development of space technology, while presenting the result as a funding counterfactual rather than established history.