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Originally Posted by Neptunus Rex
The same points have been raised since the manned space program was first announced. I'm sure there were similar views in Europe in the 15th century as well regarding sailing west across the Atlantic and the search for the Northwest Passage once the Americas were reached.
It has to be the next horizon. It's human nature to push.
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Yes its human nature to push the boundaries, but in the end you have to capitalize on that drive. After Columbus discovered the new world, he and his men didn't just go home and leave it at that.
The american space program was always politically driven, first to beat the soviets and then to keep happy the aerospace industry with a broken hardware design, the Space Shuttle.
Colonizing space has never been a target for Nasa notwithstanding what the PR say, only few people really had the vision that was necessary to achieve such a lofty goal and they understood that it was an endevour what would have taken decades.
Von Braun was one of them. He always advocated that the US space program procede by baby steps. First putting orbital space stations around earth. Then creating a moonbase. And then putting in place the infrastructure to go back and forth betwwen the earth and the moon. And in the future on to Mars and beyond. Those ideas were scrapped by POLITICIANS whose only drive was to beat the soviets. And what was gained in the long run ?
The decomissioning of the Apollo program and its hardware (at least some of it was used for the Skylab missions). The investment in a broken design of the Space Shuttle that should have been able to do the real SHUTTLE missions between earth and leo instead of 2 flights per year at astronomical costs at the best ? The impossibility of having a permanent human prescence in space. And so on.
Human colonization of space is a process, its not a goal. When you design a program around a goalpost, then once it is achieved, almost always the program will be scraped. It did what it was supposed to do and thats it. No more funding. Thats a pretty short vision to have, and it has plagued the american space program since its inception.
Everything (the manned space program) was sacrified on the altar of "beating the soviets". Great you did it, unfortunately 50 years after we are still at the same point. With hindsight this whole process was a FAILURE. Historians will see it as that. A FAILURE that cost at the time hundred billion dollars to put 12 men on the moon. And for what exactly ?