General Discussion

... the U.S.A. fearing we were falling behind threw a huge amount of money into science education, from kindergarten to college. I grew up in that rich environment. We heard about the space program almost every day in school.

I heard about it at home too. My grandfather was an aerospace engineer who worked on the Apollo Project. I've got some of his drawings, photographs, and his Apollo 8 "flown metal" appreciation medallion.

Sending men to the moon was a big adventure then.

If the Artemis 2 project was a movie it would be the 2026 remake of 1968's Apollo 8. An actual movie from 1968 is Stanley Kubrick's 2001. A remake of 2001 would have to take place in some alternate universe. Here in our universe there were no Pan Am spaceliners flying to giant rotating space stations.

What we've learned since the first manned space flights is that space is not any kind of "new frontier." It's a place extremely inhospitable to human life. ( New frontiers, of course, were also a myth. Most of earth's habitable places were populated by humans in prehistoric times. The "American Frontier" we celebrate in our grade school history books was genocide. )

Manned space exploration is a dead end. Any science a human can do in space robots can do better. Any resources we might find in space are more readily available to us on earth. It's easier by orders of magnitude to live on Antarctica than it would be to live on the moon or Mars. How many people live on Antarctica?

"Boomers" like myself and previous generations may have been inspired by manned space flight and science fiction such as Star Trek. We can't expect later generations to be inspired by more of the same.