In all honesty, the Apollo project and the Pyramids were vanity projects. The pyramids were completely a vanity projects that had very little, in fact most likely negative, effect on the general populous. The extra labor went towards a pile of stones rather than a better home for themselves.

The Apollo project had benefits and spin-off projects that helped create products that normal people can use such as cordless power tools, kidney dialysis, flame proof fabric, and other things.

Starship, could be world changing. If quick reuse drops the price down, then cheap, and reliable access to space could be civilization changing like the engineering successes listed in my intro