Interesting viewpoint on why we went to the moon and then stopped

[svetz]

Neil deGrasse Tyson is giving a talk and he has an interesting viewpoint in that there are 3 big drivers that make things happen: fear, profit, love of country/king/diety. It also goes on to talk about things that changed the world that were never envisioned. A pseudo quote is: the most important thing we discovered when we went to the moon was the earth. The link jumps to skipping over the intro, but the whole thing is interesting. The quote is around 12 minutes.

 

[robby]

I can't bother to watch the whole one hour clip but as someone who lived through the Era I can tell you that the real reason we stopped was because the Public lost interest and the politicians wanted to stop funding the missions.
NASA had almost 400,000 people working on the Apollo program via hundreds of contracts and in house personnel.
It was super expensive and by time they got to the Apollo 13 the public interest had already waned.
Apollo 13 bought back some temporary interest but it soon faded again. The same thing happened with the shuttle and it's now happening with the Mars rovers.

 

[Brewman]

I think Space X has the country going again on space travel. Today almost 20K people watched a live stream of the tower being put together. 20K on just one channel. Look at You Tube at the number of channels dedicated to Space X. I think the problem with NASA is the length between anything exciting. Government oversight and having to look at everything with a fined tooth comb for years between tests kind of kills the excitement.

 

[time2roll]

I can't bother to watch the whole one hour clip but as someone who lived through the Era I can tell you that the real reason we stopped was because the Public lost interest and the politicians wanted to stop funding the missions.
NASA had almost 400,000 people working on the Apollo program via hundreds of contracts and in house personnel.
It was super expensive and by time they got to the Apollo 13 the public interest had already waned.
Apollo 13 bought back some temporary interest but it soon faded again. The same thing happened with the shuttle and it's now happening with the Mars rovers.

I agree. And diminishing returns to do the same thing over and over and over again. The real mandate was to beat the Russians and we did.

 

[chrisski]

When I taught elementary, I said we went to the moon and then we invented the personal computer and have never been back. Now we have a device that will tell us the answers to the universe at out fingertips, and we spend out time all day looking at cat videos.