[Freedom4US]

Very few of the public understand, even though Kennedy's "I believe this nation should commit itself.." ;) speech was in 1963, as much as a couple years later, engineers and scientists were still arguing over the rough design and method of actually getting to the moon, there were no spacecraft _actually built_, just tinker-toy models! Contractors must have been pulling their hair out.

[CWOJackson]

"Contractors must have been pulling their hair out."

And relying on slide rules for much of their work.

[anymouse]

Well back then the space program was really another front in the Cold War. There was no option to just flake out. We were in a "duck and cover" world, where beating the Soviets to the Moon was infinitely more acceptable (at the personal and national level) to a real threat of a thermonuclear war of Mutual Assured Destruction. Then there was no higher honor than to be part of the race to the Moon.

Now politics is more important than engineering a way to get back to the Moon. It is a fight over how to spend tax dollars.

With the end of the Cold War, we missed the opportunity to shift the space paradigm to a commercial industry (like every other postwar period had resulted in a commercial boom as technology and skilled workers were readily available.) Instead Clinton and Gore turned it into a global socialist program with the Russians. The irony is that the Russians had fought to shed socialism only to be forced back into it with NASA. There was a brief window where commercial joint US-Russian efforts were starting to get off the ground, but NASA worked hard to extinguish that spark of freedom in space every time it started to take hold.