"People" didn't go to the moon, the US government went to the moon. And they were primarily driven by the motivation of military development and the growth of s

"People" didn't go to the moon, the US government went to the moon. And they were primarily driven by the motivation of military development and the growth of soft power. After the landing on the moon there was unprecedented public support for further expansion. Aside from the general public the astronauts themselves, practically all of academia, and even people such as Wernher von Braun, the chief architect of the Apollo program had expressed not only desire by technical capability and ideas of how we could get to Mars. But the wills of the people and the wills of government often conflict. And government generally wins. As the military and soft power tasks had been effectively achieved, government interest in space rapidly waned. There were also extremely petty reasons. Nixon, in part, also did not want to drive what he felt was JFK's legacy, and instead aimed to create his own; something he certainly achieved. There's a great writeup on his views and decisions regarding space and NASA here [1]. He is one of the biggest reasons that space died, though it must be said that any president following him (with a compatible congress) could have just as easily resuscitated it as he killed it. Trump reportedly was willing to offer NASA an 'unlimited' budget if they could get a human on Mars before the end of his first term. Something that's unfortunately almost certainly technically impossible given the state of our dilapidated space program (relative to where it could be today). The point of this all is that the 21st century will be the first time the people go to space, let alone to another celestial body. And there's no reason to expect we'll turn back. The nice thing about a capitalist system is that so long as the money is there, things will happen. You can look at society as a venn diagram between money and desires for space. There's far more than enough of an overlap there to sustain space indefinitely even without the incredible wealth of certain players such as Bezos. [1] - http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/jason-callahan/20141003-how-richard-nixon-changed-nasa.html http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/jason-callahan/20...