That's how long it's been since Kennedy's speech in which he committed the nation to send men to the moon, and return them safely to earth, before the decade was out. A little over eight years later, the job was accomplished, with a dozen men walking on the moon over a period of three and a half years. It's been over a third of a century since the last footprints were made.

Depressing, isn't it?

Here's even more depressing. I'm 30 years old. No one has walked on the moon in my lifetime.

A blot upon our civilization that it has been a third of a century since human beings have been to the Moon.

Peter,

I know how you feel. I was only 2 when Apollo 17 lifted off from Taurus-Littrow. I feel like I missed one of the most amazing achievements of all time. (Even if it was NASA doing it.) It's criminal that we haven't been back and established a permanent base, ala Arthur C. Clarke, rather than Nixon's gloomy prediction of not returning in the 20th Century...

Mark, Peter,
At the most basic level this is an issue of political will.

About once a year I write, fax, phone and e-mail each of my senators and my representative.I tell them that I think space exploration is important, and let them know it is something I care about.
The hand written letter is probably the most important as they figure that only one in 10K people that actually care about something will bother to sit down and write a letter.

If you have not done this you have no grounds to gripe. Please pass this thought along to all of your space fanatic friends.

I usualy also try to stress how how the origional moon program made heros of scientists and engineers and inspired lots of kids to become scientists and engineers. I believe that the tech boom of the 90's was the direct result of the children of apollo reaching their demographic peak of productivity. I was 7 for the first moon landing.

Paul
P.S. Recently I can't write my represenative, he is in jail, we select a new one on June 2nd.

I am 32, another who has not seen a person on the moon in their life time - though to me that was a military objective that the private sector failed to follow up on. Partly this was due to government’s industry corrupting influences, partly it was due to the private sector failing to find a way around the government so as to access the customer/tax base directly. As demonstrated by the taxes willingly allocated, the market was and still is very substantial and obviously there. Unfortunately the government has strived to keep that market to itself.

Now days, a billion aimed specifically at the crux of the problem could probably solve the CATS problem once and for all. Thirty years ago it may have required ten billion – still well within the then tax payer funded space budget. The problem has not been a lack of funding/willing customers, and that statement is even more true now days. With every passing year technology has improved and the cost of space has come down. The problem has been the systemic miss-management of the R&D industry in general – space is far from the only field to so suffer. Like any other industry, it is not in the public best interest to run R&D as a monopoly.

There is a gap between publicly funded blue sky research, (academia for example), and the short payback periods required for a purely commercial operation. One type of gap bridging solution that suggests itself is a privately funded investment which is directed at the industry as a whole. Many investors believe space could go through a boom period that would justify billions in investment now, and they would so invest now if they could somehow be assured of a stake in such a future boom.

An example of such a direct investment in that future boom might be a company that say, offered to publicly buy shares in the first few companies that completed fifty orbital flights, (on the open market and to a publicly pre-stated monetary sum - say $100 million worth). Presumably those companies that completed the fifty flights would by and large have developed a large stake in the burgeoning space industry, sufficient to provide a substantial return on the original investment to the investment company.

While our manned program has been "downhill" since 1973 at least the unmanned planetary probes have continued to be funded, built and operated. Those of us in our thirties have watched the moon landings on the history channel, but we have downloaded daily panoramas from the surface of Mars through the internet.

The pace of advancement in spaceflight has been slower than I had hoped, but I think there is a compelling arguement to be made that technology and capitalism is driving the price of spaceflight down at exponential rates and therefore we WILL live to see men walk the moon again in our lifetime. My bet is that it will be an outgrowth of Rutan/Allen/Bransen/Shuttleworth/Tito rather than NASA.

Cheers

--Fred

Fred does raise an excellent point. There have been some spectacularly successful robotic missions in the time since, which is terrific. I'm certainly not an either/or type when it comes to that. I'm rooting on the private space types too, because I ultimately want to see the cost of access to LEO come down to the point where we can see a lot more of both manned and robotic missions.

I do want to see a manned mission to Mars as soon as it's feasible. We don't just go for the science, though there will be plenty of that; we go for horizons-expanding adventure of it. I want to feel that moment of species-level pride when the boots of a fellow human being touch the rust-red soil of another planet. At the same time I'd like to see many more robotic missions go where human beings cannot yet go. I'd like to see flotillas of JIMO-level craft ply their way through the solar system to the outer planets and be able to send back vast volumes of data when they get there. There's plenty of room for both, it's simply a shame that bureaucratic bungling has cost us so much wasted time in the intervening years.

At the most basic level this is an issue of political will.

I don't buy this argument. Political will is not an independent variable. It is a product of interaction of interests of constituencies. Elected politicians are supposed to listen to the voters.

We didn't go back to the moon because not enough people found value in going back to the moon. Is this somehow a character defect on their part, or is it just a ground truth about the utility of manned space activities?

"We didn't go back to the moon because not enough people found value in going back to the moon."

But the political will, tax funding, market size or whatever you want to call it was still sufficient to pay for a sustained lunar program assuming a sensible low cost R&D friendly approach had been adopted. Calling off Apollo was not a vote against space so much as a vote against the extreme financial waste of Apollo.

We didn't and haven't gone back to the moon because the voters of the USA saw Apollo for what it was; a useless political stunt with no practical benefits.

A rational space program would probably have seen men walking on the moon in maybe 1985, but they would have been there to work, not to pose for the cameras. And well before that, there would have been a proper infrastructure. By now, space would have been giving us real, tangible benefits; energy, scarce minerals, and most important another basket to put our eggs in.

Instead, what we got was some impressive video footage and a nice lawn ornament.

Apollo wasn't all bad though; without it, I doubt I'd ever have had the machine I am now typing on. And without that famous Earthrise picture, I might not be here to type it.

Apollo wasn't all bad though; without it, I doubt I'd ever have had the machine I am now typing on.

We'd have had integrated circuits even without Apollo (which contributed to their maturation during a period of a few years in the early 1960s, but did not cause them to be invented). For example, the military was being driven to use them, for fundamental reasons.

Er, guys. The reason it was done in jig time in the 1960s was solely because JFK (largely at LBJ's urging) decided that it was necessary to stage a technological Muscle Beach Contest with the Soviet Union to convince the rest of the world that both our economy and our missile technology were superior to the USSR's, despite Khrushchev's constant loud yellings to the contrary. We did so, by the simple expedient of spending $90 billion in today's dollars on the subject in one decade.

Whether you regard that bizarrely specialized endeavor as justifiable or not, it was successfully completed -- which means that since then there has been no sane justification for any space program (particularly any manned one) remotely as big. Find one (and lots of luck in that), and just maybe you'll get a few supporters other than your own tiny flock of space-religious believers.