The Moon: Why We Haven’t Been Back

This is, as usual, the blogified version of the script from my new YouTube video.

Exploring space is an amazing, beautiful, inspiring, noble human endeavour. Since the earliest days of humans looking up at the night sky, we’ve wanted to know these distant point of light, visit other planets, see what’s happening on other bodies, and, ultimately, figure out where we fit in on the cosmic scale, leaving bootprints along the way.

Right? Or is space a political bargaining tool with a side of science?

As an historian who has spent more than a decade unpacking the Apollo program, trust me when I say space exploration and politics are inextricably linked. And I understand that anything politics can be polarizing in today’s landscape. So upfront: my agenda is a neutral deep dive into the policy decisions that have shaped human spaceflight since NASA’s inception in 1958. We’re going to look at the origins of NASA and how Apollo worked from a policy, structure, and funding standpoint because that’s really the most important part. And also that’s my expertise. Apollo has set the standard not only for how we approach space but, crucially, how the public imagines and expects space exploration should work. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it million…