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Comment by hapticmonkey | Hacker News Reader

That's like saying The Apollo moon missions were meaningless because they failed to set up commercial hub on the moon.

I hate to say it, but in a sense, they were meaningless because there was no followup. We haven't had a machine that could even get us back there for 50 years now.

One could argue that we are doing the followup even to this day (with the China CLEP programme, India’s Chandrayaan, USA’s ongoing Artemis campaign and others). The deed was done, the minimum bar was set and humanity has been as determined as ever to breach the peak it had achieved back in the sixties even as government funding waxes and wanes. Public interest has not changed in the least.

> Public interest has not changed in the least.

Declining public interest cancelled the Apollo program. Modern rocket scientists had to dismantle the Saturn V engines to figure out how they worked.

In a way they're meaningless because they were just a way to extend the "space race" to an arbitrary milestone the US could claim for itself after having lost almost everything else to the reds.

Sadly, while Apollo was important as a proof-of-concept exercise, it was up to future generations of spacefaring explorers to give it meaning by following through on the initial achievement. Unlike the post-Columbian European settlers, we've dropped the ball.

By the time we get back to the Moon, my guess is that over half our population will believe that the Apollo missions never happened at all. There can't be much of a leap from "Bush blew up the WTC" and "Trump won the election" to "The moon landings were faked in Hollywood."

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