Recovering space fanatics like me, who grew up dreaming of the cosmic conquest Nasa laid out before us in the 60s - to wit: today the moon, tomorrow lunar bases, space stations and intergalactic joy rides - can hardly be expected to raise a celebratory cheer for the 30th anniversary of Apollo 17. By now, we believed, we would be seeing routine missions to Mars and projects to colonise more distant worlds. Instead, we never got past first base. Since Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt blasted off the lunar surface, no human has set foot on the moon - and none is likely to do so again unless the space industry executes a dramatic volte-face.
One of the stranger consequences of this space inertia is that an entire generation has grown up viewing the moon landings as little more than a quaint piece of modern history, like flower power or the cult of Elvis. Stranger still are the vast numbers of people who subscribe to the various "moon-hoax" theories that charge Nasa with having staged an elaborate piece of Capricorn One-style fakery in order to trick the Russians and justify squandering $24bn of the federal budget. In a sense, the whole Apollo era has acquired the aura of unreality.
It doesn't help that the marvellous contraptions that sent men hurtling into lunar orbit are now museum pieces in front of which fathers give their sons impromptu lessons in American patriotism: with their thick metal husks and diving-bell portholes, they look as antiquated as anything dreamed up by Jules Verne. Most of the engineers who designed them, meanwhile, are dead, and the launch facilities that once made Florida a crucible of futuristic fantasy to starry-eyed space fans have been left to wrack and ruin. In fact, it's hard to avoid concluding that if supplied with sufficient funds and the requisite political will, Nasa could not return humans to the moon even if it wanted to.
Part of the problem, of course, is that Nasa stopped reaching for the moon long ago. To be precise, it gave up the fight after Richard Nixon put a stranglehold on funding for space exploration, rightly judging that an America in recession and at war with Vietnam would scoff at lavishing money on astronauts bouncing about in micro-gravity and nibbling thousand-dollar space snacks.
The agency did try once, though vainly, to retain its visionary mandate with the 1973 launch of Sklylab - a space station welded together from existing Apollo hardware that, over the next four years, housed three separate crews for extended stays in Earth-orbit. But after Skylab, Nasa lost no time working out how to survive in a post-Apollo world: it retired many of its scientific staff, grew fat with bureaucrats and staked its future on the Space Shuttle - the one (and distinctly non-visionary) programme Nixon was prepared to fund.
Still, to blame Nasa for failing to realise our air-whipped fantasies of cosmic conquest is largely to miss the point, because in the unforgiving glare of hindsight it's clear that the fantasies themselves were unreal, so far outstripping what was conceivably possible to achieve technologically that they never really stood a chance of getting off the ground. It's the problem of seeing the moon as a kind of Ascension Island, midway between posts, that might someday trade with one another. The idea is beguiling, and it was mercilessly exploited by space activists such as Arthur C Clarke. But the distances involved in space travel are simply too great to make the old imperialist metaphors work.
We may not like the idea that the moon represents not first base but last base, but it's hard to make a strong case for humanity's space-bound ambitions when even the astronauts of Apollo (Tom Wolfe's mighty "lone warriors") proved less interested in the dull, grey satellite spinning beneath them than in the distant blue-green planet they'd left far behind.
"The vast loneliness of the moon up here is awe-inspiring," said Jim Lovell during a live broadcast from Apollo 8. Barely missing a beat, he added: "It makes you realise just what you have back there on Earth." Lovell was not the only warrior to experience such homesickness. Frank Borman read from Genesis; Bill Anders obsessively photographed the Earth, and Russell Schwieckart marvelled at how the small blue-white marble he surveyed through the window of Apollo 9 could contain "all of history and music and poetry and art and death and life and love, tears, joy, games".
The real legacy of Apollo, over and above the historic first of "getting there", is that it redefined the moon shot for future generations as the gestalt-shifting moment that gave us singular insight into the fragility and preciousness of our home planet. It is no accident that the first Earth Day in 1970 coincided with Apollo's demise; that Anders' photographs became icons of the Earth First! and Whole Earth environmental movements; or that space-age mystics everywhere began waxing eloquent about the existence of one global soul. Bit by bit, all our outbound space rhetoric was internalised, and from here everything else flowed: Gaia, designer Buddhism, transcendental meditation, the international peace movement, anti-nuclear protests, tree-hugging and rebirthing. The space age, in other words came home to roost on Earth.
In the face of Nasa's defeatism, there has emerged an entrepreneurial movement determined to take another shot at the moon. The ostensible spur to action came in 1996, when the US military's Clementine probe first indicated that ice might be lurking deep within a crater at the moon's southern pole. Since then, Nasa's inconclusive 1999 Lunar Prospector mission made crystal clear the need for more data, and into this information breech have leapt a whole raft of new-wave space capitalists eager to provide it.
In addition to the Japanese government and the European Space Agency, at least two private space companies plan to launch ice-scouring, commercial moon probes in the next year-and- a-half. Virginia-based LunaCorp hopes to profit from its mission by selling scientific data to Nasa and by supplying the entertainment industry with interactive video games that will allow players to experience virtual lunar tourism, while Transorbital's Trailblazer mission is looking for customers for its high-definition video, lunar maps and new Earthrise images.
On winning government approval in September to land on the moon, the Transorbital president, Dennis Laurie, told CNN: "We're not returning to the moon simply to explore, we're returning because there are true revenue opportunities there."
The message, in short, is that capitalism will do what Nasa has so far failed to do and take us back to the moon. What's more, it will make the moon a paying proposition.
Space visionaries take heart. For amid the din of commercial excitement over the moon, and the overt enthusiasm for robotic probes, a few echoes of the old dreams - of humans in space and human futures in space - can still be heard. John Young, former Apollo 16 commander and now Johnson Space Center bigwig, has long campaigned for a return to the moon. Only last month he issued a four-page memo urging Nasa to reconsider its reluctance to commit to such a goal. Titled The Moon Will Save Us, Young's memo called for the need to establish the necessary infrastructure on the moon that will allow us to build the first human bases there for living, working, and aiding Earth.
Like Young, most space-industry entrepreneurs feel that Nasa needs a new mandate to push the space frontier beyond low-earth orbit, where we've puttered about aimlessly for three decades. But their rationale for doing so needs closer examination. Young, for example, is primarily motivated by the idea that humanity needs both an advance guard for and a refuge from the giant asteroid that will some day collide catastrophically with Earth.
Rick Tumlinson, space entrepreneur and founder of the pro-humans-in-space group the Space Frontier Foundation, similarly believes that humanity needs somewhere else to settle. In 1995, Tumlinson, who now runs an annual "return to the moon" symposium, stood before the US house of representatives and read its members nothing less than a manifesto. "For the first time in the history of the planet there is nowhere left to go for those who wish to leave the old, or create the new ... or, to put it more exactly ... there is nowhere left to go which does not harm this planet, or is not the property of someone else."
Leaving aside the irony of Tumlinson invoking the eco-awareness that was a byproduct of Apollo to justify a new era of lunar exploration, what is striking about his and Young's scenarios, is that the moon figures less as an Ascension Island than as another New World - a place where we might flee persecution, mortal danger, or simply other people. You could argue that the old (and, largely optimistic) mercantilist metaphors have given way to a gloomy apocalyptism. But that would be to mistake the improving desire to start over somewhere new for the more straightforward tug of escapism.
The moon, I think, is first and foremost a source of inspiration, a spur to ideas and action. And if by returning we succeed only in shaking up the calcified meanings that now attach to Apollo, it will surely be worthwhile - regardless of whether future missions lead to the hope of lunar salvation.
· Marina Benjamin's Rocket Dreams will be published in April.
