Space travel turned out not to be very fun. The rollicking exploration of pulp stories where you see new worlds and new creatures every week or every book was replaced by a reality of cold, dead, empty planets/moons. You need to travel weeks or months or years to get anywhere, and spaceships, instead of being comfortably elegant or adorably ramshackle with smuggling compartments are cramped, crowded, and require you to shit in a tube.
If/when space travel becomes a place for the very rich to vacation, such as on spacious air-filled moon-bases or on large space stations with artificial gravity, I think it might become exciting again.
How about large stations with artificial gravity and zero-G? We were launching 747 sized hulls 97% of the way into orbit, only to dispose of them about once or twice a year for many, many years. (Shuttle main tank.) Large trampoline-sided spaces would result in really cool new sports and forms of art.
This article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kessler/why-you-should-be-more-interested-in-mars-than-the-olympics_b_1712462.html -- ok, I admit, I read Slashdot sometimes, no one is perfect ;) -- made me wonder why the awesomeness of space conquest stopped motivating people.
I remember the tales of my parents at the time of the Apollo landing, it was indeed instilling awe and wonder in the minds of people. It was followed by people like the Olympics or the football competitions are. And nowadays, NASA about to send a nuclear-powered rover to Mars, in a very delicate mission requiring the best of human engineering and scientific skills, and not in line in most media, most people not even aware of it? How did we fall that low?
Sure there was the Cold War. It definitely played a role, in the amount of resources invested by both sides in space conquest, and in the way the media broadcasted the news.
But here in France, a country that was mostly neutral during the Cold War (slightly west-aligned, but not part of NATO for most of the Cold War), the interest of people for space was not really partisan. People who were pro-USSR were amazed and cheering for the Appolo mission, people who were pro-USA were amazed and cheering for Gagarin. My brother and I played with (USSR) Sputnik as much as with (USA) space shuttles. We praised equally Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin. I don't think the lack of Cold War explains it all.
So what happened to the space conquest spirit? How did it disappear? I notice a blank spot on my map (well, not totally blank, but still very fuzzy) of reality, do some of you have clues for how to fill it?