>I've always wondered why the US never went back to the moon. Or never set up a moon base for space exploration and experimentation.
The US sent half a dozen crewed missions to the moon, and made numerous unmanned missions.
There's no dark secret - space travel is complex and expensive, travel to the moon vastly more so than simply to orbit, and money is governed by politics. When the US had the prestige of possibly beating the Soviets to the moon , there was the political and popular will to do so. But eventually, the trick simply got old, and no longer seemed worth the expense.
Now take that, and add the exponential long term cost of a habitat and mining operation on the moon with 1970's / 1980's dollars and tech. I remember there being numerous plans for a moonbase at the time, it was discussed by NASA often, but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.
I find it odd that in the 60s it was deemed affordable, but during the 2 decades of boomer super cycle, the female migration to the workforce, and spending money now which our grandchildrens grandchildren will be repaying... we could ill afford it.
You're missing something important: back in those days, we didn't have to funnel all our wealth to a small number of billionaires (in fact, the term didn't really exist back then). Now, we do. Giving the vast majority of our wealth to a few billionaires like Gates, Buffet, Bezos, etc. costs a lot. So yeah, we simply can't afford this kind of stuff any more.
It wasn't considered to be worth the cost, that's not entirely the same as not being affordable. The US wanted to focus on the Shuttle, satellite reconnaissance and Star Wars.
The ISS is a good example of this phenomenon - it was going to be "Space Station Freedom[0]" before it became the "International Space Station" because budget cuts made the original plans no longer feasible.
Also the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, which presented both an unexpected opportunity and a risk. Opportunity in that Russia was no longer the enemy and could be a partner with experience running space stations. Risk in that Russia was not going to spend as much on space by themselves as the Soviet Union did, and their rocket engineers might have been tempted to go work for Iran, North Korea or other countries with nuclear ambitions. By doing the ISS together with Russia, those engineers were kept employed.
> but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.
I'd sooner they spent the money on a lavish boondoggle that would inspire a generation (moonbase) than a lavish boondoggle designed to blow stuff up (F35).
Note: I'm not a disliker of the F35, I think when they work the bugs out it'll be a pretty fantastic plane - though whether it'll be value for money is arguable (and there isn't enough evidence one way or the other).
Moonbase will be a lavish boondoggle designed to blow up and then activists will argue that this boondoggle must be scraped and money redirected to world hunger/saving whales etc.
I'm not discounting the efforts the US made back then. And there are many ongoing efforts - obviously I am not discounting those. I am questioning the rationale to not take advantage of the significant lead, especially when we (as humans) have better technology than before
The US sent half a dozen crewed missions to the moon, and made numerous unmanned missions.
There's no dark secret - space travel is complex and expensive, travel to the moon vastly more so than simply to orbit, and money is governed by politics. When the US had the prestige of possibly beating the Soviets to the moon , there was the political and popular will to do so. But eventually, the trick simply got old, and no longer seemed worth the expense.
Now take that, and add the exponential long term cost of a habitat and mining operation on the moon with 1970's / 1980's dollars and tech. I remember there being numerous plans for a moonbase at the time, it was discussed by NASA often, but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.