>>7618722>In the early 1970s people expected a base on the Moon within a few years.In the early 1970s, the US space policy was to build a launch system that could only go to LEO and forbid all private competition with it. The Saturn V factories were already closed, the personnel reassigned or laid off, the tooling scrapped.
A moon base was achievable, but there was no will within any capable government to do so, and private work toward that goal was heavily restricted by various governments.
Today, there's more hope because there's more freedom. NASA's own plans for Mars somehow manage to simultaneously be unambitious and implausible, but since the early 2000s the US government has been supporting and subsidizing, rather than discouraging and preventing, diverse private entities making their own progress toward such goals.
