I remember how school physics teachers face lit up when the discussion about moon landing came up. He told that there was great speculation and differing opinions on what would happen next (like Heinlein and Clarke do here) but nobody thought that next 50 years would be just "Boldly going where Yuri Gagarin has gone decades before".
Simple rule for futurology: Economies of scale + incentives >> inspiration + technological ability.
Our smartphones match or outpace what science fiction of that time thought possible. Internet has transformed our culture in just few decades. In space only satellites are good business and they make just $260 billion revenue per year. There is not enough ROI in space to justify investing significantly more money into it.
> nobody thought that next 50 years would be just "Boldly going where Yuri Gagarin has gone decades before"
Pretty comically dramatic undercounting of what has been accomplished since Yuri Gagarin.
Hubble alone embarrasses that premise. The ISS does as well. What New Horizons recently accomplished, by itself, is enough for me to feel entirely comfortable with what we've accomplished as a species over last 50 years regarding space. The same goes for Curiosity on Mars.
The sole issue is the lack of understanding and appreciation for how difficult these truly extraordinary accomplishments (of which there have been many others I didn't list, such as Voyager or Rosetta) are compared to merely blasting someone into an orbit around the planet.
I don't think anyone is undercounting what has been achieved, or overestimating the importance of Gagarin's flight (which was important as a stepping stone).
It's that all the achievements you mentioned happened pretty much on a shoestring budget compared to Apollo era. 'nabla9 is right about how economics beats ability, but it's still a fucking tragedy if you think what we could have had by today, if humanity poured a bit more money into space.
As far as the smartphone angle you mentioned, it makes for a decent analogy, but isn't entirely relevant unless I'm being too specific.
Computational power was never the problem getting to the moon. The analog computers were basically some op-amp circuits. I think they had a differentiator and an integrator. You don't need 4 modern cores running on Android or anything. In fact, simple is probably best and safest.
Overall, I'm just being nitpicky and fully agree with the rest in that space currently isn't worth the economic cost.
Hundreds of billions are spend in computer and electronics R&D every year because they increase economic productivity and there is vast market and demand for them. The demand enables fast development track.
If space exploration was the only use for computers, we would be still using 60's era computers. Without military applications for missile technology we might not have been in the moon at all.
Simple rule for futurology: Economies of scale + incentives >> inspiration + technological ability.
Our smartphones match or outpace what science fiction of that time thought possible. Internet has transformed our culture in just few decades. In space only satellites are good business and they make just $260 billion revenue per year. There is not enough ROI in space to justify investing significantly more money into it.