I've seen you mentioning some variant of "put a man on the moon" several times in this thread, apparently referring to the cathedral-like project to do so, along with several comments along the lines of "Microsoft software isn't a cathedral because it's designed to create a monopoly market, not software".

Unfortunately, those statements seem to be contradictory; the United States ran the Apollo program for national pride, to cow the Soviets, not out of some grand desire to visit the moon. The science done by Apollo was secondary, and if you believe exploring space was a primary goal, you are going to have a hard time with the question, "why haven't we done it lately?"