Why does it take so much time for NASA to send astronauts back to the moon again?

Question

I don't understand why did NASA close the Apollo program back then and now they are saying that their next mission to the Moon will be around 2020 with the Orion spacecraft. I think that if NASA wouldn't have been closed up the Apollo program, people would be flying to the moon by now as often as astronauts fly to the ISS and probably humans would now also be on Mars.

I think that it is because NASA is not as much desperate to get to the Moon as it was back in the Apollo program. People right now are not as much interested in it as they were before.

Does anybody think that NASA should accelerate that progress and take it more seriously? How can we affect them?

As we all see, right now NASA is busy with the ISS, but isn't it time to make a progress, OK, humans can live in space for a long time, we have the technology and the money needed, so why are we stock around our own planet for so long? It's almost 2009!

Answer 1

The named astronauts never went to the moon in the first place. The so called race to the moon was a stitch-up as was the cold war. The whole sorry farrago is very complicated, but if I was to sum it up in a nutshell it's about control of power by the few to farm the masses in various ways that also maintain that control.