Their passion helped, but it consumed 4.4% of the US federal budget at peak and might well have been cancelled if JFK hadn’t been assassinated — for basically the same reason no human has returned there since Apollo or gone to Mars at all, and for the same reason Space Station Freedom was cut back and morphed into the ISS — or if NASAs work hadn’t been deliberately spread through most states to make it a pork barrel for senators looking to boost their own state using the Federal budget.
It’s basically only now that we have a new space race run by absurdly rich space-nerds that we don’t need active public support, merely that the criticism is limited to grumbling.
It’s basically only now that we have a new space race run by absurdly rich space-nerds that we don’t need active public support, merely that the criticism is limited to grumbling.