> Yet it has been 53 years since we have been able to send a manned mission to the moon
A near total lack of demand explains that impressive stall.
Even if the shuttle had worked out as well as its designers hoped, was envisioned as a major retreat, while sucking all the dollars out of the room.
And today, the market for lunar landings is still very small.
I think what it shows is that many technologies might have come earlier from a research and development standpoint, if we had enough money to burn. But that was an unusual situation.
Yes, Economics is a key factor for innovation. However it alone is not sufficient. At times you simply need other foundational breakthroughs to happen and they will have to be in sequence, i.e. one breakthrough has to happen and become widespread before work on next one can progress, before you can achieve meaningful progress on the end goal.
It is not like Fusion or Quantum Computing has lacked serious or continuous funding over the last 20-30 years.
Foundational model development is a classic current example. The returns are diminishing significantly, despite the tens of billions each quarter being thrown at the problem.
No other R&D effort in our history has this much resources being allocated to it, perhaps including even the Moon landings.
However the ability to allocate resources has limits. Big tech can spend few hundred billion a year a number that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago, but even they cannot spend few trillion dollars a year.
A near total lack of demand explains that impressive stall.
Even if the shuttle had worked out as well as its designers hoped, was envisioned as a major retreat, while sucking all the dollars out of the room.
And today, the market for lunar landings is still very small.
I think what it shows is that many technologies might have come earlier from a research and development standpoint, if we had enough money to burn. But that was an unusual situation.