50 year anniversary since man last set foot on the moon

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How time has flown. I'm old enough to remember the last time a human set foot on the moon.
December 1972 during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission.
During the Apollo 17 mission, Eugene Cernan became the eleventh human being to walk on the Moon. As he re-entered the Apollo Lunar Module after Harrison Schmitt on their third and final lunar excursion, he remains as of 2022, famously: "The last man on the Moon".

So December 2022 will be the 50th anniversary. Strangely no manned landing of the moon or Mars has ever been attempted since.

I just listened to a live podcast from Richard Branson who is pledging to restart his project to have humans on Mars. Nobody knows how long it will be before Elon Musk's SpaceX will actually be launched.

What happened to NASA? science is about progress. With all the advancements we have made, space exploration seems to be the only area that's gone backwards.

The taxpayers voted away 95 percent of NASA's budget after Apollo. And they HAVE made advances. Unmanned probes have been going way beyond earth-moon orbit to explore all of the planets for the last fifty years- giving us more science for the buck than the manned missions got us. And we have the unmanned space telescopes to probe interstellar, and intergalactic space. So progress HAS marched on, but on a low budget.

Well they do have plenty of exciting projects afoot, of which the James Webb telescope is the jewel in the crown. Deep space exploration is their focus right now. But manned missions to the moon and other more local attractions taking a back seat for now.

China might land men on the moon. And that will scare India into thinking that China is trying to the military "high ground", and get the drop on them, and prompt India to land men on the moon. And that might spark the EU, Japan, and the USA, back into a race to the Moon. And soon the moon maybe more busy than Piccadilly Circus.

How can the taxpayers vote away the budget if they only vote for presidents and house reps.
They don't run on a 'defund NASA' platform.

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Oh yes! SETI, rover missions to Mars, the Hubble and James Webb have all been fantastic.
I was referring to manned missions. People watching the moon landings in 1969 would have expected space stations and cities on the moon and Mars by 2022.

Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, a process began that has all but eradicated any reference to the substantial opposition by scientists, scholars, and regular old people to spending money on sending humans to the moon. Part jobs program, part science cash cow, the American space program in the 1960s placed the funding halo of military action on the heads of civilians. It bent the whole research apparatus of the United States to a symbolic goal in the Cold War.

Given this outlay during the 1960s, a time of great social unrest, you can bet people protested spending this much money on a moon landing. Many more quietly opposed the missions. Space historian Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum has called attention to public-opinion polls conducted during the Apollo missions. Here is his conclusion:

For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much onspace, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.

We've told ourselves a convenient story about the moon landing and national unity, but there's almost no evidence that our astronauts united even America, let alone the world. Yes, there was a brief, shining moment right around the moon landing when everyone applauded, but four years later, the Apollo program was cut short and humans have never seriously attempted to get back to the moon ever again.

I can't pretend to trace the exact process by which the powerful images of men on the moon combined with a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era of heroes combined to create the notion that the Apollo missions were overwhelmingly popular. That'd be a book. But what I can do is tell you about two individuals who, in their own ways, opposed the government and tried to direct funds to more earthly pursuits: poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron and the sociologist Amitai Etzioni, then at Columbia University.

Heron performed a song called, "wh***y on the Moon" that mocked "our" achievements in space.

Many black papers questioned the use of American funds for space research at a time when many African Americans were struggling at the margins of the working class. An editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel, for example, argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)."

This is, of course, a complicated story. When 200 black protesters marched on Cape Canaveral to protest the launch of Apollo 14, one Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader claimed, "America is sending lazy white boys to the moon because all they're doing is looking for moon rocks. If there was work to be done, they'd send a n****r."

But another SCLC leader, Hosea Williams, made a softer claim, saying simply they were "protesting our nation's inability to choose humane priorities." And Williams admitted to the AP reporter, "I thought the launch was beautiful. The most magnificent thing I've seen in my whole life."

Etzioni attacked the manned space program by pointing out that many scientists opposed both the mission and the "cash-and-crash approach to science" it represented. He cites a 1958 report to the President from his Science Advisory Committee in which "some of the most eminent scientists in this country" bagged on our space ambitions. "Research in outer space affords new opportunities in science but does not diminish the importance of science on earth," he quotes the report.

He keeps piling up the evidence that scientists opposed or at best, tepidly supported, the space program. A Science poll of 113 scientists not associated with NASA found that all but 3 of them "believed that the present lunar program is rushing the manned stage. Etzioni's final assessment—"most scientists agree that from the viewpoint of science there is no reason to rush a man to the moon"—seems accurate.

But that's just the beginning of the book. He has many other arguments against the Apollo program: It sucked up not just available dollars, but our best and brightest. Robots could do our exploration better than humans, anyway.

The race to the moon may not have been wildly popular among scientists, random Americans, or black political activists, but it was hard to deny the power of the imagery returning from space. Our attention kept getting directed to the heavens—and our technology's ability to propel humans there. It was pure there, and sublime, even if our rational selves could see we might be better off spending the money on urban infrastructure or cancer research or vocational training. Americans might not have supported the space program in real life, but they loved the one they saw on TV.

Indeed, Nixon had fully embraced the success of Apollo 11 in July 1969, calling the seven days of the mission “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” He had become the first sitting president to attend a human launch, sitting through a rainstorm to see Apollo 12 lift off in November. But his enthusiasm for human exploration was short-lived; by December he was already telling his associates that he did not see the need to go to the moon six more times. Then came the near-tragic Apollo 13 mission in April 1970. Nixon became emotionally involved with the fate of the astronauts, fearing that future missions could result in astronaut fatalities. If he could have, Nixon likely would have ended Apollo flights then and there, but the image of quitting after a problem overrode that impulse. Nixon tried hard during 1971 to cancel Apollo 16 and 17, only to be talked out of that step by his advisors.

Not only did Nixon propose a premature end to exploratory flights to the Moon; he was not willing to take the next step, setting out on a path leading to Mars. NASA had proposed to the White House in September 1969 that post-Apollo space activities be focused on preparing for human missions to Mars at some point in the 1980s. Nixon and his associates decisively rejected that proposal as they cut the NASA budget in the months following the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 successes. In March 1970, the White House issued a presidential statement on space saying that “what we do in space from here on in must become a normal and regular part of our national life and must therefore be planned in conjunction with all of the other undertakings which are also important to us.” This dictate set the space program in competition with other government programs for resources. It has not fared well in that competition; From 1970 onward, NASA has not had a budget adequate to support a robust program of human exploration.