I disagree that we don’t have the knowledge or the people to accomplish a second trip. iPhones have more computing power than the whole damn Apollo craft. We clearly can do it again.
I think the real revelation is that what’s broken is government. In the 1960’s, we still had a government that was capable of functioning. They wrote NASA a blank check and put no-bullshit people in charge of seeing it done. Nowadays, a $1,000,000 part from the 60’s would cost $1 billion, and not from just inflation. The permit to manage the stormwater runoff from the parking lot of the plant required to build the part would cost $1 million. And then .gov would make them dig detention ponds to clean the runoff, spend $25 million monitoring endangered turtles, and $50 million on paternity leave for the engineers annually, etc.
TLDR: government has gotten so bloated, corrupt, and beholden to regulations written by self-important bureaucrats that the efforts of even the best and brightest engineers with bleeding edge tech are strangled to nothingness.
