Well, see, you've missed the problem right there. We went to the moon .. almost 40 years ago. Full stop.
Why did we stop there? It's really quite simple: the politics didn't support it. And the main reason why the politics didn't support it was that Apollo was essentially a novelty program -- once we actually succeeded in reaching the moon, there was no further return on the investment. Meanwhile, there were more politically compelling alternatives for the money, right here on Earth.
Explore. Advance. Improve.
Sure, but don't be stupid about how you do it. Space travel needs to find some mission that will provide a real return on investment. We don't have that yet, and we never will unless we can put in place some serious orbital infrastructure.
No, it's not sexy -- but infrastructure rarely is.
Oh, and please don't try the tired old "let private enterprise do it" canard. They're even more focused on "return on investment" than the government space program is, and there is no return on manned spaceflight.
The truth is that space is likely to remain a government-funded thing for a long time to come.
If I read my history books correctly, Columbus, Magellan, DeSoto, Pizarro, all of the explorers into the unkown or newly discovered were all government funded.
I’m an ultra-conservative sitting in a NASA office. Think about NASA this way - We spend money on research to find out what WON’T work. What does work, we give to the public.
IF we stop pressing forward in exploration, our sciences will slowly begin to die. The desire to “find out more” applies to space, also.