And China at last count was graduating 10X more engineers than the US - BA’s are mostly worthless these days. PhDs are mostly going overseas. Heavy industry cannot get enough engineers to satisfy demand - salaries are 6 figures just to start.
Only by going back to space full time - in a nationally focused way - can this even begin to bring back the skills, education, and industry we had in the 60s - not to mention hope. Good leadership and policies can only go so far. It must be a national endeavor with naysayers taking the hindmost.
They got me down when the killed the original Project Orion - not the farce they are attempting today, hope was abandoned at Apollo 17s end.
I guess the hope is shifting to private endeavors, as the technology ripens and the costs drop into the range where corporations and rich individuals can fund their own spaceflight. They call it becoming a spacefaring nation.
Even as NASA is cultivating a competitive commercial industry for heavy lift and establishing commercial spaceports (eight already available), they are still developing more basic technology in-house, and doing deliberate planning for big objectives like permanent bases.
One thing that I have been excited about, has been a bit of a revival in nuclear power for space applications. Both the US and Russia have new small nuclear reactors being developed for space use (10 KW to 1 MW), rather than the relatively low power nuclear batteries that have been in operation. These power levels could support long term bases or even electromagnetic drive (EM Drive) propulsion, which now seems increasingly plausible.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/
EM Drives would allow spacecraft to not carry tons of fuel for in space propulsion or orbital control (they would still need chemical fuel for takeoff or controlled landing). Small nukes the size of a couple of five gallon buckets could drive continuous thrust for ten years or more. With continuous acceleration, the trip to Mars could be cut to a matter of weeks.