The Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar which will be installed on Gerald Ford Class aircraft carriers probably cost more than the entire Apollo program.
These Absurdly Stupid Aircraft Carriers, which are the 21st century version of the Maginot Line, cost much more than the entire space program through Apollo.
I lived and breathed the space program as a kid. My grandfather was one of the many engineers who worked on the Apollo Project. One of my own current interests is unmanned space exploration.
We can throw as much money at the problems of human space travel as we like, but I don't believe ordinary flesh-and-blood humans will ever have a significant presence in space beyond low earth orbit for the simple reason humans are too damned fragile. But our intellectual children might. Imagine beings that can walk around naked on the surface of mars just as we might enjoy a warm day at the beach. So maybe we should be studying artificial intelligence or genetic engineering instead of sending humans back to the moon in a sad encore.
Commercial fusion energy is a similar intellectual problem. Brute force and unlimited budgets are not likely to get us there. But maybe someone will see a faint anomaly in their fusion experiments, something surprising and unexpected, and that will be the key. It could happen at ITER, it could happen in some kid's fusor, it could happen in some physicist's daydream.
Meanwhile, we've got to do something about the carbon dioxide accumulating in our atmosphere and oceans NOW or there will be no bright tomorrows for most of us, let alone the other sentient species we share this planet with. We already have the tools we need. We don't need to claw down any futuristic technologies to get the job done.
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