[minikites]

I think both of these events together undermined people's general faith in governments to accomplish large scale projects. The two largest superpowers each failed in a big way at a task which should have been within their capabilities.

It shook the assumptions and foundations of modernity and we lurched closer to overvaluing the virtual accomplishments of economic growth and financialization. Wealth is being used to create more wealth, it is not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots

>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?

We kept trying after the Apollo 1 fire, we didn't really keep trying after Challenger or Chernobyl. Instead of trying to accomplish truly great and difficult things, we became satisfied with making numbers go up on a Bloomberg terminal.