Was manned space exploration not bold enough?
Just some random thoughts here...
Despite the political reasons for going to moon, there were plenty of people who recognized that the adventure and scientific exploration were reasons enough to go. Then once we got there on Apollo 11, public interest declined. Was it because "we beat the Russians, so game over?" Or was it that we didn't have a new goal to excite us to go to new heights?
People here on the BABB might be riveted to reading the ALSJ, but certainly not everyone in the world is (a shame, isn't it?). So after Apollo 11, people weren't that interested in the various experiments done on the subsequent missions. It was always the same ol' LM landing with two guys running around on the surface for a while before coming home. In some respects, I don't blame them. Mankind had made the "one small step", but there was no next step ready to be taken.
I think their interest might have been retained had we already had other major planned missions in the works (and not just on the drawing board or in people's heads). Missions like a Moon base, or a manned mission to Mars, etc. If the public had looked at the Apollo missions as the beginning, with the next steps already planned and known to the public, rather than an end, I think we might have gone further.
Perhaps if JFK has said "putting a man on the moon and bringing him safely back to the earth, as a first step to even greater achievements in space exploration..." or something of that nature, things might have turned out differently. Perhaps, had he lived, he might have said something like that.
All the enthusiasts were probably already geared up for continuing, and in fact expected Apollo to just be the beginning. But unfortunately, we are/were in the minority, and so we didn't. As I've heard exploration advocates say many times, if we're going to have serious manned exploration, we have to have a plan and mean for it to be a serious, continuous program. If we're going to go into space, we've got to mean it, and we have to go into space for good.
Hopefully if/when we do some serious exploration again, I truly hope we heed that advice.
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