in the 1970s NASA shelved the mighty Saturn V launcher, along with the lunar module, lander and return capsule - and with this we lost the capability to send people beyond Earth orbit.
Credit: NASA
Forty years later, the sad truth is this: today, we do not venture beyond our own backyard. Our travelling horizon lies no farther than the International Space Station (ISS), some 350 km above us.
The two pioneers of manned space flight, Russia and America, have been joined by China, but so far it has done no more than replicate their brief low-orbital trips of nearly half a century ago.
While robots do all the real exploration of space, humans are stuck in a rut, says Francis Rocard, an astrophysicist in charge of Solar System exploration at France's National Centre for Space Studies (CNES).
"There is a deep disinterest around the world for manned flight today, including in the United States," he says. "There's boredom with the flights to the ISS, which nobody finds interesting, neither the media nor the public."
1969 was styled as the 'giant leap' that would take us to other worlds. But, in retrospect, was it the year when we peaked? Experts say there are several reasons why our expectations have slowly deflated like a wrinkled balloon.
The biggest, is that there is no longer any rivalry between superpowers – and without it the almost limitless cash for manned spaceflight has dried up.
Fearing Moscow's domination of space, the U.S. pumped more than 5% of its federal budget into NASA in the mid-Sixties. At the program's peak, more than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo program.
"We didn't go to the Moon for Teflon pans or lunar rocks. We went to the Moon to beat the 'dirty commies'," is how Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut, has described it. After America won the lunar race, public interest waned – along with NASA's budget.
The last three Apollo missions were axed, leaving Apollo 17, in December 1972, to close this golden age of achievement.
With it came a crossroads decision on where to go next. Other worlds, even nearby Mars, were just too far away. Using slow, chemical rockets, it would be too dangerous and too expensive to send people there, and there was little point in building an outpost on the lifeless, waterless Moon.
