[idlewords]

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.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, all the other destinations in space are far away (it's called space for a reason!) and sending primates to those places is expensive and hard. There'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's manifest destiny to become an interplanetary civilization.

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're dealt.

[martythemaniak]

It is well understood that history not a nice, neat, little linear progression. It is full of stop and starts, stagnation, dizzying S-curves, revolutions, backlashes and regressions.

Apollo was a wonder, yes an outgrowth of the arms race, but also a manifestation of a purposeful and unified nation that just doesn't exist today. It was unsustainable, but it was also very long time ago.

I find your views that "things are hard, so we shouldn't do that, and we should never get off this planet" unfortunately common. Here's two things to consider:

- Sending people to space is not just fancy. Today's robotic missions are like trying to fill a swimming pool with a pipette. In 7 years Curiosity has driven a total of 8.6km - an slow afternoon stroll for a person. Every single little action is planned and executed at an excruciatingly slow pace. Nothing can be fixed or adjusted. InSight ran into a rock and now it might not be able to burrow it's instrument down. Digging down 3m might prove too much for that robot, a trivial task for any human.

- If humans don't have outward goals, we're much more likely to just look inward and spend our collective energy tearing each other apart. Without looking outwards, the entire Earth will become one giant vapid high school.

[idlewords]

Apollo was not the product of a 'purposeful and unified nation'. The period 1961-1972 was one of the most politically turbulent in American history, to an extent we forget today. Politically motivated bombings were routine news! Apollo was the product of its time in interesting ways, but let's not deceive ourselves about America in 1969 being any more unified and purposeful than it is today.

I have nothing against doing hard things, but I think sending people to Mars is a hard, dumb thing, and that the money for that will be better spent on mechanized probes to more interesting places (like Ganymede or Europa) along with space telescopes. Other people feel differently!

But I am tired of the amount of special pleading in this debate. Everything is hard on Mars, because it is on Mars. Antarctica has water and all the air you can breathe, and yet we can barely function there. If we send people to Mars, it will be a one-shot deal like Apollo was, and then all the space nerds will be sad again. Better to fund robots at 1/10 of the level of a manned mission, and get to explore the entire solar system instead. If people are dead set on humanity having a 'backup plan', then the Moon is right next door and we can even set it up with wifi.

[TeMPOraL]

> Better to fund robots at 1/10 of the level of a manned mission, and get to explore the entire solar system instead.

The unfortunate reality is, once people settle for this, the 1/10 will get cut to 1/1000 because "all you do is send robots to dead rocks". Funding science isn't sexy these days.

> If people are dead set on humanity having a 'backup plan', then the Moon is right next door and we can even set it up with wifi.

For some x-risks Moon may be just a bit too close. I understand that the x-risk avoidance argument is a niche one, though. IMO we should absolutely do the Moon - and then Mars or Venus (or both).

[TeMPOraL]

> There'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's manifest destiny to become an interplanetary civilization.

Beyond other reasons given by the pro-colonization crowd, there is a simple reason. It's there, it's within reach, so why not?

> 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're dealt.

And yet people haven't been to the Moon since Apollo, so I feel the problem isn't with the lack of stepping stones.

[jblwps]

> It's there, it's within reach, so why not?

Opportunity cost, if nothing else? Think of the immediate, real impact we could have by throwing money at (to pull an example out of a hat) malaria. Not to say that there mightn't be real gains to be had by manned space missions (although I'm somewhat skeptical of the magnitude of those gains), but there's more uncertainty for sure.