What about Voyager, ISS, Hubble, Mars rovers, Mars helicopter(!), and Cassini/Huygens missions? There's more to do in space than just going to the moon. I'd love to see us back there as well, but I think there's still a whole lot to be excited about.
I am very excited about space and the future, I just think that in the years since Apollo the story has been emblematic of wastefulness, contractor level benign corruption (cost plus contracting) more than it has been inspiring with the stories you mentioned. just my opinion.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
2 https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/nasas-sls-moon-rocket-is-2...
> NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending....In 1973, NASA submitted congressional testimony reporting the total cost of Project Apollo as $25.4 billion (about $156 billion in 2019 dollars).
I wonder if there also wasn't that level of waste at that point but not too many people cared because the country was mostly terrified by the USSR and wanted to win.
Ironically, I think the more we think there's corruption and waste, the more that may lead to corruption and waste, as we distrust and defund and discourage. Again, I imagine some of the waste comes from the fickle attitude that some of the public and lawmakers have towards funding these orgs.
The stagnation in aerospace is mostly due to us running into fundamental limits of physics pretty quickly, not due to some kind of work ethic or creative failures. to keep pushing forward in space would have required another order of magnitude in funding, and funding during Apollo was already huge. That said, I wouldn't mind if all the worlds military $$$ had been dumped into mars colonization either.
We've sent hundreds of robots all over the place. To Mars, Jupiter, asteroids, comets, the outer planets, out of the Solar System entirely, as close to the Sun as can be managed, and everywhere else in between. For basically all of these missions, sending humans along would be 1000x more expensive, and the humans would be bored to tears for 99.9% of the time. For most of the rest of the time, they'd be relying on the same instruments as the robotic missions, as the environment is too harsh for anything else. So what's the point?
And who would we be sending? We could send super-smart scientific experts to maybe follow up on things a little faster, but it'd be a waste to have them sit around for years on the voyage back and forth. Or we could send more ordinary folks, who might not be all that much more capable than the robots we're sending now.
Sorry, it might burst some peoples bubbles of romance and sexy space adventures, but it mostly just doesn't make sense to send humans into space for the type of exploration missions we're doing. Maybe if we can send enough resources to actually have a colony on Mars or something, but we're not there yet.
As to what we can do in space: the value of reusable boosters is very understated. Why don't we have a manned mission to Mars? Because it takes a huge payload with lots of delta-V. Sending ten rockets up for orbital refueling was always a pipe dream in terms of cost. Suddenly it's attainable and the solar system is our oyster. It's still expensive, but we now have the tools.