Sending a couple of guys to the Moon and bringing them back safely? That's a stunt! That's not historic.
The decision to go to the moon is now appreciated and associated with President Kennedy's speech, but somebody else had told him it was a good idea. It turned out to be a good commitment, but it was a unique situation.
Does it make sense for the U.S. to expend hundreds of billions of dollars to mount a new Apollo-style program to return to the moon? Or have we blazed that trail? Shouldn't we help other nations achieve this goal with their own resources but with our help?
Going back to the moon is not visionary in restoring space leadership for America. Like its Apollo predecessor, it will prove to be a dead end littered with broken spacecraft, broken dreams and broken policies.
If we go back to the moon, we're guaranteed second, maybe third place because while we are spending all that money, Russia has its eye on Mars. Landing people on the moon will be terribly consuming of resources we don't have. It sounds great - 'Let's go back. This time we're going to stay.' I don't know why you would want to stay on the moon.
I was motivated to improve the U.S. strategy of going back to the moon in 1985. That's a long time ago. Going back to the moon would be a great achievement for tourism adventure flights.
All the Chinese have to do is fly around the Moon and back, and they'll appear to have won the return to the Moon with humans. They could put one person on the surface of the Moon for one day and he'd be a national hero.
Exploring Mars is a far different venture from Apollo expeditions to the moon; it necessitates leaving our home planet on lengthy missions with a constrained return capability.
To send humans back to the moon would not be advancing. It would be more than 50 years after the first moon landing when we got there, and we'd probably be welcomed by the Chinese. But we should return to the moon without astronauts and build, with robots, an international lunar base, so that we know how to build a base on Mars robotically.
Any observations from the Moon or a sense of realising this or that about the greater meaning of things wasn't as influential for me as the experience of coming back and dealing with being a person who's been to the Moon.
