As a Space Enthusiast who grew up reading pop-sci books for kids with an optimistic take on the world I grew up thinking that by the year 2000 there would a lot of space activity in LEO, GEO and even the Moon. A Mars mission might’ve returned, or be not far from launching.
In reality I was born in the year 1970 – the year of Apollo XIII and the near cancellation of the US manned space-program. Nixon almost killed off everything after Skylab, but he bought into the Shuttle spin at the last minute, committing the USA to a space vehicle program that had no mission. It’s a little known fact that a large 12-person Space Station was due for launch in c.1975, to be tended by the Shuttle, to be followed by a 50-person Space Base by 1980, which would be expanded to 100-persons by 1990. When the Station program was cancelled it effectively removed the main justification for the Shuttle, but by then the bureaucratic machine was in “Program Mode” and inexorably moving forward.
Now, some 37 years after that decision, we have a Future that no one expected.
as it is the business of the future to surprise us, it seems unwise to rule out such scenarios – Paul Gilster