> The prestige of being the 2nd to land on the moon should be a draw. No? Has there been any great achievement in recent memory that parallels the moon landing. Where something monumental happens and nobody else tries to match it?
Other countries have been to the moon -- Russia and China even landed vehicles and brought them back[1]. What they did not do is send people. Only the wealthiest countries in the world can afford to do space exploration, and they have better things to spend that money on than sending astronauts on sightseeing tours.
> Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why?
"Technology" is not a uniform thing. Computers are many, many orders of magnitude better than they were in the 1960s. Rockets have not improved nearly as much. It currently costs thousands of dollars per kilogram to get a payload to low earth orbit. If you want to send a ~70 kg human with hundreds of kg of support equipment into space, they had better have something to do that's worth at least a million dollars. That's way too expensive for almost any kind of human work, which is why the target market for commercial human spaceflight is "bored rich people" rather than "people with something useful to do".
For a longer answer on why human space travel (and especially colonization) probably isn't going to happen the way we'd like, see Charles Stross's essay "The High Frontier, Redux".[2]
Other countries have been to the moon -- Russia and China even landed vehicles and brought them back[1]. What they did not do is send people. Only the wealthiest countries in the world can afford to do space exploration, and they have better things to spend that money on than sending astronauts on sightseeing tours.
> Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why?
"Technology" is not a uniform thing. Computers are many, many orders of magnitude better than they were in the 1960s. Rockets have not improved nearly as much. It currently costs thousands of dollars per kilogram to get a payload to low earth orbit. If you want to send a ~70 kg human with hundreds of kg of support equipment into space, they had better have something to do that's worth at least a million dollars. That's way too expensive for almost any kind of human work, which is why the target market for commercial human spaceflight is "bored rich people" rather than "people with something useful to do".
For a longer answer on why human space travel (and especially colonization) probably isn't going to happen the way we'd like, see Charles Stross's essay "The High Frontier, Redux".[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#S...
[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...