That's like asking "If homeopathy worked and all the doctors were wrong, would they admit it?"
No; it's like asking "If homeopathy didn't work and all the homeopaths were wrong, would they admit it?" You can find plenty of critics of Big Science and/or government spending on prestige projects, just like you can find plenty of critics of homeopathy.
If funding the Apollo Project was a complete waste of money compared to the normal grant process, the world would be a different place, because that would require levels of incompetency on NASA's part so great that it would get noticed.
If homeopathy was a complete waste of money compared to normal medicine implying 'great' levels of incompetency on homeopaths, how would the world look different than it does?
You can find plenty of critics of Big Science and/or government spending on prestige projects,
Those people generally claim that Apollo was a waste of money period, not that Apollo was a waste of money compared to going to the moon via the normal grant process.
I just finished the first draft of my essay, "Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?"; there is still material I need to go through, but the bulk of the material is now there. The formatting is too gnarly to post here, so I ask everyone's forgiveness in clicking through.
To summarize:
(If any of that seems unlikely or absurd to you, click through. I've worked very hard to provide multiple citations where possible, and fulltext for practically everything.)
I started this a while ago; but Luke/SIAI paid for much of the work, and that motivation plus academic library access made this essay more comprehensive than it would have been and finished months in advance.