“Now, 50 years later, looking back on Apollo, it’s clear how that was probably the single most significant historical event in modern times, and it really shows us and the world what you can do if you work together and you work hard, keep to the plan, and plan your mission out step by step all the way to the moon. I wish we could do that today.
“I know the difficulty of doing anything in this huge government bureaucracy…But we still do incredible things. [The International Space Station is] the most complicated thing we’ve ever done, probably more complicated than going to the moon…We can still achieve things if we work hard at it and don’t change the plan, but part of the problem is we change the plan every four years.” – Astronaut Scott Kelly
Indeed, the reason why the Apollo missions were cut short (spacecraft for three more missions had already been built), and spaceflight has been a series of fitful starts and stops ever since, is because the government runs the show. Not visionaries who look past the next election cycle. Perhaps the private sector, which has made leaps in accessing space in recent years, will finally open the final frontier. Fifty years late, but better late than never.
And on 
Darrick Dean 