Pournelle has some comments
Here.
From another Pournelle comment:
Once we walked on the Moon. When I was in high school in the 1940's I read science fiction and knew that I would live to see the first man on the Moon. I did not know I would live to see the last one.
NASA ate the dream. It is not lack of money. It is NASA, turf wars, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
We have spent enough since Apollo to be half way to Alpha Centauri. We cannot even go back to the Moon.