There wasn’t realistically the public interest or unlimited cash that the Apollo program had to work with, so this was never going to realistically happen in the 80s or 90s, shuttle or not.
Given the technology, there’s no way that we’d have gotten the relatively quick sugar rush like we did for the Moon landings; it’d have been a long, very hard, and very, very expensive slog to get people there.
There’s approximately a zero percent chance that the level of public enthusiasm for such an endeavor would have supported the amount of money and effort needed to make it happen.
Heck, we even cut the Apollo program short because the public quickly got bored with it once we had the big shiny.
There wasn’t realistically the public interest or unlimited cash that the Apollo program had to work with, so this was never going to realistically happen in the 80s or 90s, shuttle or not.
Given the technology, there’s no way that we’d have gotten the relatively quick sugar rush like we did for the Moon landings; it’d have been a long, very hard, and very, very expensive slog to get people there.
There’s approximately a zero percent chance that the level of public enthusiasm for such an endeavor would have supported the amount of money and effort needed to make it happen.
Heck, we even cut the Apollo program short because the public quickly got bored with it once we had the big shiny.