The moon landings had one critical aspect lacking in most of the more recent space projects...
...it was a race!
A race with real live all American heroes vs. the dreaded 'commies', in a time when folks still fully expected the eventual winners to plant their flag and begin colonisation a few weeks later, with all kinds of cool 'stuff' like they saw in the movies.
And then they just bought back some stones and dust, and some holiday snaps of a big grey rock with dents in it. Hell, it wasn't even made of cheese after all that effort!
Sadly, most of Joe public don't give a rodent's posterior about the scientific value of space exploration any more (or science in general)- all they see is geeky people chewing their way through this boring stuff called 'data', and maybe if you're lucky a few pretty false-colour pictures of something incomprehensible.
Stick some random people they never met before in a field and get them to slug it out to see who is best at doing something utterly pointless - they'll buy in some beers, and sit there glued to it.
I apologise for my cynicism - but, as I see it, unless/until the Chinese catch up enough to lend space exploration an element of competition again, I just don't think it has the 'bread and circuses' appeal to win anything like the public backing that it enjoyed back then. Folks might accidentally miss a celebrity wedding or some such trivial nonsense, and that just wouldn't do!
At the very least, the public like to see real people "boldy go" up there, so that they can identify with their trials and tribulations (tribble-ations?) - but that is the most expensive, inefficient and scientifically restrictive way to find out anything of value. I'm not suggesting that it is a worthless thing to do, but when projects are struggling for funding, it just isn't going to happen.
Still, I don't really feel as if our generation has 'nothing'. Maybe what we have is less 'visceral' somehow, but I never cease to be fascinated by the incredible things that have been discovered by projects like the Hubble telescope etc. In fact, I kind of like the idea that these incredible far-away things are not sullied by humans going up there to 'sensationalise' and trivialise them - science without the 'soap-opera' aspect.
I doubt that the aliens want us out there anyway - at least not until we've learned to behave ourselves in our little play-pen a bit better!
