Any nation that wanted to go to the moon would have to lay out a fortune developing the appropriate infrastructure. The Apollo program cost the United States well over $100 billion in current dollars, and that's for a nation that already had an established space launch infrastructure and trained astronaut corps.

Developing a manned spaceflight program takes time. It took China 11 years to move from authorizing manned spaceflight to their first manned flight, and that's using updated technology while still cheerfully exploiting American and Russian research and engineering to the full.

These programs are hard. It's not just a matter of buying an Acme Saturn V hobby kit and fueling it up. You have to have a wealth of experts, a deep institutional commitment and resource base, and years of dedicated effort.

And it suffers from diminishing returns. No nation is going to get the prestige boost the United States did from landing on the moon for the first time. No nation needs a prestige boost of that magnitude, since no one is locked in a titanic Cold War. And as the Apollo missions made plain, the only return on a moon landing is prestige - unless you want to keep doubling down on expense and commitment until you're building a moonbase, at which point you can start refining fuel for hypothetical future fusion plants.