In many ways it's really rather a shame that the Apollo program was successful. On the one hand it was unquestionably a civilization defining historic achievement for all mankind. On the other hand, the way it was achieved was not something we should want to emulate: the political horse trading, the management and development style, and the expense. LBJ used every political trick in the book to get Apollo running, and they worked. But we've been left with the political legacy of those tricks for the 4+ decades since then which have been massively distorting manned spaceflight policy and efforts without further Apollo scale achievements.<p>Unfortunately, the public generally only sees the good from Apollo and so tends to imagine that the methods of Apollo were also good, and should be emulated. They should not. There are better ways to run big, ambitious projects and better ways to get back to exploring worlds beyond Earth as well.
OK, so, yeah, we spend all that additional money and a few more people get to vacation on the moon. But even from a scientific perspective, would we have gained anything like proportional knowledge from the investment? The mid-1970s simply lacks the technological infrastructure to put a self-sustaining colony on the moon, and a non-self-sustaining one would be ferociously expensive. We still lack the tech today, after all. What would be the point of all of this?<p>I've said it before on HN and a few other places, but this sort of thought experiment just leaves me further convinced that rather than 1969 being some sort of technological height from which we've fallen that the whole space race caused a bizarre sport of technological growth that was not backed by the rest of the tech it needed to be backed by to be successful. Robotics was unbelievably primitive. Materials science still young. Medical science is even today too young to support people in space (we are permanently hurting everyone we put into space for any significant period of time).<p>The space era is in the future, not the past.
Apollo was cancelled because after all the patriotic hoopla died down people realized this stuff was far too expensive to be of any practical use.<p>That hasn't changed, either. There simply isn't any reason to send people to space.