Not one to mock progress or innovative accomplishment. However revisiting the moon and establishing a permanent presence of humans will be enormously expensive. What will be the return to justify the cost? When the huge sums were committed to build, launch, man and maintain a permanent orbiting space station, it was not only exciting but the claim was that the “science” performed on the lab would bring huge benefits and insights to mankind? So far there have been no such accomplishments or obvious return on the huge investments. Philosophically the moon landings were important because they showed that mankind had the intelligence and capability to achieve such a feat. Little doubt that it has the capability to establish a moon station and possibly go to Mars. However is it wise to do so? Perhaps it is but the taxpayer supported effort should be debated thoroughly.
What was anomalous was allowing the technology to be lost.🙄
He should use his big rocket to create another skylab.
I never believed the moon landings were fake but after witnessing all the BS the government has served in the last 22 years, I have to wonder.
Build a city on Mars. Not likely.
Still, it wasn't all a waste. A lot of great technologies (besides powdered orange drink) came from it.
I think it would be a great goal for civilization to bring K-12 education to the new century. We’ve let it die on the vine with the current system we have. We should have dozens of different kinds of private schools that people can choose from and use the current dollars to follow the students.
Musk is another history-ignorant victim to “recency bias.”
The USSR scrapped its own moon shot program in 1974 (still not having built a booster capable of the mission) because there was no longer any point in spending that much money and expending that many science-years in the process. America already had stolen its thunder because the whole thing was basically a political “dog-and-pony” show.
It was never about advancing science, it was next to entirely about who’s (national) penis was larger.
Also, until it had been proved that we could get there, no one gave much thought to what uses it might be put to once you’d got there. Before Apollo, the general consensus was that the moon was uninteresting dead rock. It was only after Apollo that serious men put serious thought to what it could be used for, and began creating the technologies that would be needed to exploit it.
Understand the mindset of the era.
The Cold War was raging. For fear of a Soviet attack, kids in school were practicing the “duck and cover” drill. There were regular Civil Defense messaging tests on TV and radio. Many large civic buildings (and caves) had signage designating them as Civil defense emergency shelters. And as if the shock of the launch of Sputnik wasn’t enough, when the godless Russians also put the first man in space, the American people were apoplectic.
JFK wasn’t thinking about the cause of science (or colonizing Mars) when he proposed putting a man on the moon, he was thinking about a project that would give the American people hope and, if successful, would assure them that American tehcnocracy was superior to communist technocracy.
America got to the moon six times and the Rooskies hadn’t even managed to get a working moon rocket on the drawing board. What would have been the point of spending more billion$ and risking more highly skilled Americans’ lives on such shaky technology?
The point already had been made and the point of diminishing return already passed.