Why haven't we went back to the moon since Neil Armstrong first landed there?
Since the last time a person visited the moon - during NASA's Apollo 17 mission in December 1972 - a number of NASA crewed missions to the moon have been proposed, but none have gone the distance. [1, 5] One reason for this is a lack of political will, said Casey Dreier, senior space-policy adviser, chief advocate, and biggest space fan at the Planetary Society. [3] John F. Kennedy did not commit $5.4 billion in 1960s money - what amounts to more than $45 billion today - because he cared about space, but rather because he saw Apollo as a front in the Cold War. [4] Another reason is budgetary: while the Apollo program was incubated in a specific environment - the Cold War space race with the Soviet Union - the current environment is different, and there are other demands on the federal budget. [2, 3] Private companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX may be the first entities to return people to the moon. [5]
The primary reason we haven't gone back to the moon is that the political will and the competition that drove us to the moon in the first place is gone [1,3]. The Cold War conditioned both the US and the Soviet Union to view the moon as a territory to be claimed and symbolized an era when the two countries were competing to outdo each other, both in science and in warfare [1,3]. Once the Cold War ended and there was no longer a need to compete with the Soviet Union, the US no longer had the political will to send astronauts to the moon [1,3]. Similarly, other countries haven't been interested in pursuing the moon as a territory for research or exploration since the US has already claimed it [2]. The price tag on returning to the moon is also prohibitively expensive and involves significant risk [2].