That's because they don't do anything groundbreaking. Not to run down the hard work of astronauts and mission planners - I am very cognizant of the effort and achievement that goes into things like maintaining the Hubble telescope for so long.
The Space Shuttle was cool, tremendously cool - we built a reusable spacecraft. That blew my mind in the 1980s. So did the idea of a space station, and indeed the ISS is also fairly cool - although people would be a lot impressed if it was bigger and had rotational gravity.
The reason the space-optimism is gone is twofold: 1) it is hard to do stuff in space, and it's true there's not so much we could usefully do on the moon, that would have immediate, obvious short term benefits; but 2) it's been >30 years since we [qua humanity] went to the moon and even though we've done all sort of insane technical stuff with lasers, computers, and what-not, it seems - especially to the casual onlooker - that we can't think of a single interesting thing to do on the Moon now that we couldn't have done 30 years ago.
1) is an issue, for sure (although I feel limited by my own lack of scientific knowledge in considering the possible benefits). But 2) just pisses me off. We can't think of anything cool and somewhat affordable that we could do on the moon? Really? Even with robots? Moon TV NOW godammit!
The Space Shuttle was cool, tremendously cool - we built a reusable spacecraft. That blew my mind in the 1980s. So did the idea of a space station, and indeed the ISS is also fairly cool - although people would be a lot impressed if it was bigger and had rotational gravity.
The reason the space-optimism is gone is twofold: 1) it is hard to do stuff in space, and it's true there's not so much we could usefully do on the moon, that would have immediate, obvious short term benefits; but 2) it's been >30 years since we [qua humanity] went to the moon and even though we've done all sort of insane technical stuff with lasers, computers, and what-not, it seems - especially to the casual onlooker - that we can't think of a single interesting thing to do on the Moon now that we couldn't have done 30 years ago.
1) is an issue, for sure (although I feel limited by my own lack of scientific knowledge in considering the possible benefits). But 2) just pisses me off. We can't think of anything cool and somewhat affordable that we could do on the moon? Really? Even with robots? Moon TV NOW godammit!