Our Fate Is in the Stars
This is an odd piece of nostalgia, unfortunately representative of a genre. The Apollo program grew directly out of a panic about nuclear weapons, and the technological race to build rockets that could rain those weapons down on an adversary on the other side of the planet. No nuclear bomb, no Apollo.<p>The same geopolitical conflict that produced the space race also gave us the war in Vietnam, which in turn made the expense of ongoing lunar exploration unappealing (the war cost about 4x as much as the Apollo program) after the prestige milestone of landing on the moon was completed.<p>The space program was a fluke of history. We had a frightening new weapon that gave an overwhelming advantage to the side that could develop orbital rockets, a rough balance of power, and a natural satellite just close enough to get to without having to learn to assemble stuff in orbit.<p>Unfortunately, all the other destinations in space are far away (it&#x27;s called space for a reason!) and sending primates to those places is expensive and hard. There&#x27;s also no reason to do it (given advances in robotics and autonomous systems) unless you subscribe to a kind of cultish belief in humanity&#x27;s manifest destiny to become an interplanetary civilization.<p>If there had been an intermediate destination between the Moon and Mars for us to work towards after Apollo, things might have gone differently, but you work with the Solar System you&#x27;re dealt.