Apollo program not cancelled,set for Mars

[silk]

As in the Steve Baxter novel which i vaguely recall.As well as
Watergate & Bush was the Nixon presidency not also responsible for
the less ambitious space program of the last few decades?

[eatfastnoodle]

Well, as much as I love space exploration, I must admit shooting for
Mars during the 70s was insane and hugely hugely hugely expensive. The
difficulty of getting to Moon is almost negligible comparing to the
hurdle one has to overcome to get to Mars. I think it's right to blame
whatever policy pursued by NASA that resulted in the abandonment of
moon. But to think that a change of policy could get us to Mars in the
70s or 80s is way too optimistic, unless the US politics allowed a
complete realignment of priorities which would allocate the resources
available to Pentagon in our time line to NASA, I don't see it's
possible to put human on Mars that early. Too much work needs to be
done before any attempt should be seriously considered. Also I don't
like the tone and target of some of the rhetoric targeting NASA,
especially regarding the construction of ISS, space exploration isn't
just for the sake of exploration, we don't spend hundreds of billions
of dollars just for the bragging right to say "been there, done that".
You need to settle, to stay wherever you go. It's probably not right
to focus completely on earth orbit, we did have a chance to build some
kind of permanent moon station, but that's not the excuse to accuse
everything we've done other than shooting for the farthest star of
being a waste of time and money. We need to shoot for mars, but we
also need to build moon base AND space station. It's about expanding
our PRESENCE, not about leaving a footprint.