Why haven’t we had a manned moon mission since 1972
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To be fair to the others replying, those are part right.
The main reason (to go to the Moon) was to show the USSR that we would “beat them” in the Cold War by showing we could develop missile technology faster than they could. The USSR was winning at first, however (Sputnik, first orbit – with dog and monkey, and then first human orbit). Then President Kennedy challenged America to beat the USSR within a 8-10 year span “by the end of this decade” to bring a human to the Moon and safely back to earth. Basically, he needed the American public to “buy in” to not just the challenge to the USSR militarily but also to get public (capitalism) to buy in also. In other words, if they could get the public behind going to the moon, and by proxy build the best missiles (rockets) to do it, then the US would also have developed all the tools necessary for all out nuclear war.
It worked.
The problem is that once we got up there, the public was (as it is today) quickly bored. The television ratings for subsequent missions plummeted. NASA began mapping out plans to go to Mars but the public interest was already gone, and Joint Chiefs believed they had accomplished all the goals of the program to improve the missile technology. So, money to NASA dried up.
Hence, this is why NASA then came up with the Space Shuttle and eventually the ISS, which allowed for “space science” without the massive cost to go to the Moon
Now that there is now more interest in going to Mars, the interest to go to the Moon has reinvigorated
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