Hacker News Reader

But nothing interesting has really happened on the moon since the initial landings, so it’s not surprising that interest has dried up. There’s no colony, no space casino resort, nothing that is a big leap from the initial achievement.

The simple fact of the matter is that no one really cares about robots exploring the universe. Humans care about humans, not probes.

View on HN

That’s neither simple nor a fact. Space exploration has almost all been robots, telescopes, probes, etc. The interest has been self-sustaining with an endless stream of discoveries, discoveries including still Voyager.

And the average person has almost no interest in it, except for world-history events like the first landing on the Moon. The first landing on Mars would be a similar event.

Sustained funding for 60 years shows the continued interest in there, to use one of the “reasons” you cite for Apollo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com