This is for Bandit, if you are indeed the same Bandit who posts in the Science & Tech section of the General boards at sci fi.
Close. You have it backwards. The American public lost interest first. This is well documented. It should be no surprise, that politics soon followed. If the American people truly wanted to get a man to Mars, or even build "Moonbase Alpha", it would have happened already. That's how we got to the moon in the first place. It wasn't Kennedy, and not NASA. It was the people. We didn't care how much it cost, we wanted to get there FIRST! Well we won. It would be decades before we realized we actually just wasted our money and resources.
Respectfully,
Bandit
I have to disagree with you here. You are probably aware that overall, I'm a staunch Conservative, but to this day I consider Kennedy to be one of our greatest presidents ever simply because he gave that speech that lit a fire under this country's collective behind. Great leaders LEAD, and that is just what he did.
The Apollo program was certainly not a waste of money and resources. That came later, after the program's conclusion.
The waste of money was the choice to start spending money supporting couch potatoes, whose only contribution to society is more couch potatoes.
This was not only a wasteful choice, but as we can clearly see with 40 years worth of hindsight, it was an extremely destructive choice for the United States.
Continuing the momentum built up during the Apollo years would have been far wiser choice as to where to spend our resources. Better for the United States, better for the Human race as a whole.
