Asia on the Moon

Why in the world is there a sudden space race in Asia? China and Japan have been talking about putting men on the moon. Now India is getting involved.

Why?

What utter pointlessness. I'm completely opposed to the US placing a base on the moon. Is space travel really a good use of resources? Or does it just feed the egos of a nation's planners and politicians? Even if there were valuable resources on the moon, the cost of getting them back to Earth would be astronomical. Is this just a new and very weird form of national expansion? Really, what we are looking at here are nations that are unwilling to admit that we need to shepherd the resources we have on this planet.

Most of all, shouldn't China and India especially be using those billions of dollars to lift their people out of poverty?