Nixon, Vietnam, and a recession will do that to ya.
Becker is entertaining. Or at least, I presume that the people who watch it find it to be entertaining.
The moon landings weren’t terribly entertaining–except when they added stunts like hitting a golf ball. They were just two guys moving slowly and cautiously in cumbersome suits, doing science that didn’t mean a lot to the average layman. All they had going was the “wow” factor–human beings are on the Moon!–but that can’t sustain hours and hours of television.
At any rate, I was alive at the time, so just to add one more data point–yes, the dropoff in interest after the first Moon landing was stunning. The only later flight to attract much interest was Apollo XIII, because people could relate to the astronauts’ lives being in danger. But even then, the attitude was, “Now that we’ve been to the Moon, is it necessary that we risk men’s lives in this manner?”
One more thing. We forget today just how lousy the pictures from the moon were, compared to the images we routinely get from space today. The pictures may have been remarkable given the technology of the day, but watching fuzzy black and white images of a fuzzy shape bouncing around on a fuzzy black and white landscape grew old after about, oh, six minutes.
By the last mission, the color photos were far superior, but the tv transmissions still were poor and most people still had b&w televisions. With rabbit ears for antennas. The pictures were much better in Life magazine. But that folded too.
Not really. Many of the component level drawings and information for the Apollo hardware are lost, damaged, or have been archived in some cavernous mould-infested warehouse underneath the Ark of the Covenant. Even if we had them, some of the components may use materials or fabrication methods that are no longer available. (A direct example from my work is modifying thoriated magnesium structures; there are only three shops in the nation that are qualified to do so much as drill a hole in tho-mag.) And the engineering legacy knowledge that allows you to prejudge what approach works and what is really, really stupid has been lost as scientists, technicians, and engineers have quit, retired, and died. Even the Shuttle is coping with this; as most of the people who worked on the original development of the STS are dying off, an understanding of “why” things were done in such-and-such a way is disappearing, being replaced by an approach I call “cargo cult engineering”, i.e. doing things in a particular way because you’re aping the way it was done before.
Even the project management methodologies that worked so well on programs like Gemini, Apollo, and Minuteman are practically lost skills, replaced by people who think systems engineering is all about PowerPoint presentations, design review gates, and DOORS databases, and who don’t understand that the purpose of specifications and qualification environments isn’t some arbitary set of hoops to jump through but relates back to the real world expectations of the system capabilities. Unlike, say, Russia/Soviet Union which has a continuity of vehicle design and construction going back forty years and continuing through the present day, the US aerospace establishment and the space program in particular has goes in fits and starts, cycles of hiring and firing, and boom and bust programs which does not promote a continuity of skills and experience. If we had to build a Saturn V rocket today, the time and effort that would go into reverse engineering it and developing the manufacturing methods and tooling would be comperable to building an entirely new design.
That isn’t to say that everything is worse today than it was then; with modern computers and programming methods we can extract far more capability in avionics, communication, and navigation than was possible during Apollo (although the robustness of the ferrite core memory compared to more delicate semiconductor storage today argues that newer is not necessarily better in every way). But a lot of the hard-earned experience of doing it the first time is gone, and will have to be replaced with an equivilent amount of knowledge exacerbated by modern expectations of safety and a degree of programatic review and oversight that NASA of the Apollo era wouldn’t have imposed.
As for the apathetic response of the public to followups to the Apollo missions, I think it is due in part to the general public’s disinterest in anything to do with actual science and technology unless it goes “bing!”, and the inability of NASA to plausibly scope out a greater plan for human space exploration. NASA was chartered with getting a man to the Moon; once they had done that, they were out of scope as far as the general public and a government financially burdened with an unpopular war, inflation, and a looming energy crisis was concerned. There was never a long term plan for space exploration and exploitation, and given the cost of manned missions and the lack of fiscal return gained, not much of an impetus for continuing Apollo. Budget cutting on Apollo started in the mid-'Sixties; NASA knew by the time Armstrong put the first human footprint on the Moon that the program would be limited in scope and wouldn’t include any permanent habitation. Apollo Plus was carved again and again from an evolutionary planetary exploration program to a short lisst of missions that used already paid-for “surplus” hardware, and then cut down to the dead end Skylab missions.
Becker had much lower production costs. Television is the medium of mediocrity because like an inverted Laffer curve it is looking for lowest cost to achieve the greatest number of viewers.
And, it turns out, there are no princesses on the Moon. Now, if NASA had just thought to include some props to sex up the lunar missions…
Stranger
The problem was NASA got into a ratings mentality. They promoted the space missions as stunts and events. It was an easy angle in the beginning when the events that were occurring were naturally dramatic. But it presented NASA with the long-term problem of how could they develop space travel into a mainstream routine program without sacrificing the drama?
All of the above. Everything after Armstrong was anticlimactic. Test yourself:
Without looking, how many voyages did Columbus make to the New World? (Four, the last one 10 years after the first.)
When was the last battle of the U.S. Civil War fought? (June 1865. The last Confederate navy ship didn’t give up until November.)
When was smallpox officially declared eradicated by the World Health Organization? (1980)
This is so important that I feel the need to quote it and to underscore it. We’ve grown so used to stunning photographs from space probes that it’s hard to comprehend how unexciting circa-1970 Moon transmissions could be.
As a precocious 11-year-old space buff, I tried to get into the later Moon landings. But it was tough. “Here’s grainy, blurry footage of some guy who’s going to spend the next two hours setting up a geology experiment.” Um, OK . . . is there a ball game on another channel?
I remember my father pointing up to the moon and telling me there was somebody walking on it. I was amazed. It must have been the last moon landing when I was five. So at least some portion of the public did not greet it with apathy.
I went to the Apollo XVII launch, and the beach wasn’t exactly empty. But it certainly didn’t get the coverage of Apollo XI, or the ratings. For XI all three channels were on the air pretty much all the time they were on the moon (this was long before 24 hour news). The NY Times had a full section about it, and Nixon declared the Monday after the landing a national holiday. You could only go down from there.
I got in trouble at school for not watching Apollo 11. The teacher brought in a television set and expected us all to be excited. I was not. I put my head on my desk and tried to sleep.
My teacher immediately called me out and made me stand outside in the hallway until class was over. I mean, hell, if I couldn’t get with the program I must be punished. Never mind that this shit bored me,a 9 year old, I was so un american I desreved to be banished. A pox on my bad self, huh.
The irony is my cousin, my only real claim to fame, Fred “Pecky” Haise was on the ill fated Apollo 13. I had some interest in that one.
People take things for granted. Everyone uses all the combined technologies since roughly 1876 (telephone, phonograph, etc.), but the only time people notice is when the power’s out and their creature comforts are gone. No one cares what it took or how we got here.
I love hearing people grumbling at airports about the flight being delayed by a safety issue. Sure, let them hop on an unfit plane and rush to an early grave. Do people even know how much of that airplane’s design (inside and out) came DIRECTLY from NASA’s manned spaceflights of the 1960’s-1970’s? They think aerodyanamically sound planes and cushy seats grow on trees!
Yeah great example. Baseball’s what they use on the “watching paint dry” channel to slow things down! 
I hardly think we lost interest as a nation, until the space shuttles started flying. Americans did stop watching the all the boring parts while they went from the Earth to the Moon. Every rocket launch did something crucial towards our not being destroyed in a nuclear war or being taken over by the Soviets or China in an invasion. The Cold War effort ensured funding, and we were in a severe depression in the 70’s, so the expenditure was resented by tax payers. Notice with the end of the Cold War we still didn’t get tax relief. The government is quit good at spending every cent they can get from the tax payer until people are at the verge of open rebellion. The projects NASA funded in the 80’s and later were why interest died. People that watched launches in the 70’s had the dream of moon bases and mars landings by people die over the years. Probes visiting the planets took years to show the new cool photos, and the weren’t available in an online archive like today. Very little new stuff reached the public. Once the space shuttles were being launched all the time it was rather mundane to be the person waving to the disembarking ship.
Flying to the Moon was something the gods of ancient lore did in mythology.
We accomplish it–and then get bored with it!
What BASTARDS we are!
You have to put the whole thing in the context of the times. Those days were full of news making events. There were political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and unrest in the cities, events like Woodstock, student demonstrations, we were heading into the energy crisis, Watergate and the usual news events. Suffice it to say, there was a lot of competition for headlines.
At least the headlines were newsworthy. If the subsequent moon landings were happening today they would be moved to the back page by Bradjolina’s pregnancy.
And Godfather II is the exception that proves the rule.
I think part of the problem is that once we as a Civilised Society had been to the Moon, we kinda discovered that… well, there wasn’t anything there. Rocks, mainly. You can find those in your garden, and it doesn’t cost $24b to go there.
I have an unfortunate feeling we’re going to discover the same thing with a manned mission to Mars- we’ll spend Squillions of dollars (it will cost so much they’ll have to make “Squillion” an actual number to properly convey the cost) to put a couple of people on Mars and we as a planet will say “You know what? Mars looks exactly like the Outback of Australia, but the Outback has oxygen and doesn’t cost squillions of dollars to get to” and that will pretty much be the end of manned space exploration as we know it, at least until someone invents either a Warp or Hyperspace Drive.
In fact, I believe that Alien civilisations out there have come to exactly the same conclusion as us- “You know, Lrrr, Omicron Persei 9 looks exactly like the Vl’hurg region of Omicron Persei 8. Why did we spend a gazillion Ningis to get here? We probably could have wiped out all disease on our home planet or something with that money.”
Still, time will tell if it’s all worthwhile in the long run…
Back around 1970 one of the political columnists for the “New York Times” (probably Tom Wicker although it could have been James Reston) suggested that people weren’t interested in the astronauts. They were boring people, well qualified to do their jobs, but didn’t spark any interest in an audience in the time of Joe Namath and Muhammed Ali.
… :smack: and thus, Martini Enfield solves Fermi’s Paradox 
I’ll be sure to invite you all to my Nobel Prize acceptance dinner. 