What got a huge rocket that could power all of New York City for one
hour built multiple times, 24 humans to the Moon, 12 to walk on its
surface, and 500 pounds of rocks back to Earth, all in one decade?

Geopolitics, the military, and the aerospace business.

Everyone from NASA on down can claim that we went to the Moon for
the sake of science and knowledge, but that was just the cover story.

Of course we did do and get a lot of science, but that was always the
backseat driver. The astronauts wanted to fly an amazing new machine
and have a personal best in their careers. The engineers wanted to
build and test fly those amazing new machines.

Heck, NASA even came out with a book in 1989 by an Apollo engineer
who said the engineering was the most important thing about Apollo
and he found the project scientists annoying.

Now of course there have been plenty of smaller, cheaper robot
missions built mainly for science that did a lot of good for the field – but
they won’t directly get us as a species to the planets. Corporate greed
and groups wanting a new life away from Earth will do this.

I wish and wanted the exploration and utilization of space to be for pure
science for a long time, but it has never been that (the first space
rockets were derivatives of military ICBMs meant to carry warheads;
the first satellites were done to show the world who had the best
sociopolitical methods) and it is time we accepted that fact.

Otherwise eventually we will lose even the pure science satellites because
they need that business/political base structure too.