The Apollo Dead-End

Gee, however could this be?

Most of all, Dr. Logsdon said, hindsight had made him aware of his blindness to Apollo’s implications for the long run. He said he had been wrong, in a 1970 book on the subject, to think that the lunar decision “can be generalized to tell us how to proceed toward other “great new American enterprises.”

And like many others who for years lived and breathed the project, he finally had to recognize that the “impact of Apollo on the space program has on balance been negative.” It was, he explained, not the beginning of human voyages to Mars and lunar bases but “a dead-end undertaking in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet.”

Yeah, it would be pretty negative --when you realize the only way you can actually get to the moon is if you FAKE it.

(John M. Logsdon is a "political scientist and longtime space policy specialist at George Washington University".)