I remember how school physics teachers face lit up when the discussion about moon landing came up. He told that there was great speculation and differing opinions on what would happen next (like Heinlein and Clarke do here) but nobody thought that next 50 years would be just "Boldly going where Yuri Gagarin has gone decades before".
Simple rule for futurology: Economies of scale + incentives >> inspiration + technological ability.
Our smartphones match or outpace what science fiction of that time thought possible. Internet has transformed our culture in just few decades. In space only satellites are good business and they make just $260 billion revenue per year. There is not enough ROI in space to justify investing significantly more money into it.
> nobody thought that next 50 years would be just "Boldly going where Yuri Gagarin has gone decades before"
Pretty comically dramatic undercounting of what has been accomplished since Yuri Gagarin.
Hubble alone embarrasses that premise. The ISS does as well. What New Horizons recently accomplished, by itself, is enough for me to feel entirely comfortable with what we've accomplished as a species over last 50 years regarding space. The same goes for Curiosity on Mars.
The sole issue is the lack of understanding and appreciation for how difficult these truly extraordinary accomplishments (of which there have been many others I didn't list, such as Voyager or Rosetta) are compared to merely blasting someone into an orbit around the planet.
I don't think anyone is undercounting what has been achieved, or overestimating the importance of Gagarin's flight (which was important as a stepping stone).
It's that all the achievements you mentioned happened pretty much on a shoestring budget compared to Apollo era. 'nabla9 is right about how economics beats ability, but it's still a fucking tragedy if you think what we could have had by today, if humanity poured a bit more money into space.
As far as the smartphone angle you mentioned, it makes for a decent analogy, but isn't entirely relevant unless I'm being too specific.
Computational power was never the problem getting to the moon. The analog computers were basically some op-amp circuits. I think they had a differentiator and an integrator. You don't need 4 modern cores running on Android or anything. In fact, simple is probably best and safest.
Overall, I'm just being nitpicky and fully agree with the rest in that space currently isn't worth the economic cost.
Hundreds of billions are spend in computer and electronics R&D every year because they increase economic productivity and there is vast market and demand for them. The demand enables fast development track.
If space exploration was the only use for computers, we would be still using 60's era computers. Without military applications for missile technology we might not have been in the moon at all.
As it happened. At our little country school, there was great deal of effort to set enough televisions so we could watch the event live.
What I find amusing was seeing a video recently by a film producer/director talking about the difficulties of that time of faking the moon landings. What I took away from the video was that it was cheaper to send men to the moon than it was to build all the film and storage technology to fake the moon landings.
That has been one of my little favourite things about the whole "fake" debate and the question that goes with it. "How were these instruments placed so precisely on the moon, if they weren't put there by a man?"
To be fair, you don’t need a manned mission to install a retroreflector. The Soviet pre-Apollo Lunokhod landers included similar reflectors and they work fine.
Oops, right! I read that the Apollo retroreflectors were improved based on Lunokhod experiences and got confused. Presumably the text was referring to the later Apollo 14 and 15 reflectors.
The US didn't fake the moon landings, the American politicians faked that it was about anything but beating the USSR. They supported it and sold it as a research project to further humankind, as dipping our toes in the cosmic ocean.
Then, after the Russians were beat, the interest among the decision makers cooled off.
It was clear from the beginning it was about beating the Soviets. The fear of the USSR achieving space superiority was very real at the time, especially after Sputnik. JFK even said in his moon speech the US needed to establish "a position of pre-eminence" and would do so with the landing.
Nobody on either side of the cold war made much effort to conceal that most of the rocket research was intended towards ICBM arms race, not peaceful research.
No sane nation would pump that much money into simple research and awe. It was about the next war, or all the game theory stuff that predates or prevents it. And rightly so.
Simple rule for futurology: Economies of scale + incentives >> inspiration + technological ability.
Our smartphones match or outpace what science fiction of that time thought possible. Internet has transformed our culture in just few decades. In space only satellites are good business and they make just $260 billion revenue per year. There is not enough ROI in space to justify investing significantly more money into it.