LRO's Closer Look at Apollo 11 Landing Site | Universe Today
And, distressing. Almost 41 years ago we were there. Then, we stopped to pay attention to things at home - it was seen as too expensive, not worthwhile - we had to pay more attention to social issues.
Here it's 40 years later. Are the social issues solved? Are they anywhere CLOSE to being solved? Did the cancellation of various projects, the loss of technical jobs involved in the contracts by NASA produce an overall improvement in the country?
Well, it's kind of hard to tell... But it's pretty certain we're nowhere near where we could have been.
As long as NASA funding's a political issue ("See? We're being proper stewards of the country's money by cancelling a few billion! And that lets us spend many hundreds of billions elsewhere!") we'll see little progress - at least, from NASA. Various other possibilities arise - we'll see what comes of SpaceX, and VirginSpace - but it's become sadly clear in the last 4 decades that NASA's not what it was, not what it could be, and likely unable to ever be able to do again what they did in the '60s.
J.