It depends. We can't say for sure manned spaceflight doesn't catch people's imagination because since the early 70's we really don't send people anywhere interesting.

Er can't blame people: the ISS is as exciting as camping on your backyard. It may solve some problems and help develop some technologies important for future space travelers, but it's difficult to call it space exploration when you don't explore anything.

The state of science education also doesn't help either. Most people cannot appreciate how devilishly hard is to keep a presence in LEO.

As for keeping a presence on the Moon, it is important because we have to perfect a lot of protocols before we can pretend to be ready for a trip to Mars and, if anything goes wrong, rescue is a week away.

Even if you have to process a couple tons of rocks to get a liter of water, it would be cheaper than to send it from Earth and by landing a couple automated water factories before any humans venture there could also reduce the risks (and costs) further as they wouldn't have to carry a lot of water.

But that's why we shouldn't do manned missions first!

You can't perfect the manned spaceflight protocols with unmanned probes. The Moon is a stepping stone towards Mars and, if we can mine lunar regolith for metals, water and propellant (LOX, LH2), we are golden: the lunar base can become the best spot for building and launching spacecraft.

I wonder if there is carbon and nitrogen there too. That would make colonization much simpler.

You know what would really capture people's imaginations? Space piracy. With frikkin' laser beams. Once there are bad guys in space stealing our shit, you can be sure the public will rally around the idea of sending good guys into space.

That's because they don't do anything groundbreaking. Not to run down the hard work of astronauts and mission planners - I am very cognizant of the effort and achievement that goes into things like maintaining the Hubble telescope for so long.

The Space Shuttle was cool, tremendously cool - we built a reusable spacecraft. That blew my mind in the 1980s. So did the idea of a space station, and indeed the ISS is also fairly cool - although people would be a lot impressed if it was bigger and had rotational gravity.

The reason the space-optimism is gone is twofold: 1) it is hard to do stuff in space, and it's true there's not so much we could usefully do on the moon, that would have immediate, obvious short term benefits; but 2) it's been >30 years since we [qua humanity] went to the moon and even though we've done all sort of insane technical stuff with lasers, computers, and what-not, it seems - especially to the casual onlooker - that we can't think of a single interesting thing to do on the Moon now that we couldn't have done 30 years ago.

1) is an issue, for sure (although I feel limited by my own lack of scientific knowledge in considering the possible benefits). But 2) just pisses me off. We can't think of anything cool and somewhat affordable that we could do on the moon? Really? Even with robots? Moon TV NOW godammit!