Whaddya mean? It's currently the fastest growing OS, if you count Android & clones. QWERTY-Syndrome (compatibility & familiarity) prevented it from taking on Windows.

Like Unix people did with Multics?

Political climates change

The "space race" situation with the Soviets was a relatively rare alignment of forces. I don't think a pissing match with the Chinese carries nearly as much weight.

By the time Voyager II went by it was less of a deal.

Same with Apollo 12 and up. (Aside from 13, but that's not good PR.)

I think you are greatly overestimating how fascinating science is to the general population.

Pics of Io spewing or Mars sunsets fascinate because they are visually interesting & exotic. People go to the Grand Canyon because it's visually stunning & interesting, NOT to meet people.

I agree that adding people into the mix makes it much more interesting to the general public, but also far more expensive and risky.

And, finding plant life on a distant Earth-like planet would arguably stir the imagination more than doing Apollo again on a "red moon".

Since this could hurt Google's direct line of business, Google should buy PostgreSql, and pump scaling money and promotion into it to eat into Oracle's sales.

The Joker(s) runs the company. Whaddya expect?

I'm waiting for the Google Elevator

I do not develop big complicated documents on my phone.

Oh, they will be complicated after you make them in MS-Office.

it doesn't have to be an either/or thing

In practice, it is. The current political climate will not fund both well.

One advantage of human spaceflight is that you get science on human biology.

That's incremental knowledge and we don't have to go to Mars to get most of the same thing.

There is no robotic exploration mission you could possibly design that would gather even a fraction of a percent of the attention that a manned mission to Mars would get

When Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979, the news-stand publication covers were full of images of the swirling red spot, the pizza-like Io, and its spewing volcanoes. I saw those pics all over the place. An ocean/lake sunset on Titan via a boat-probe could have a similar effect. Or discovering the spectrum of plant life around a distant planet; it would ignite the public's imagination.

On a side note, another problem with Mars is that we don't know the biological contamination risk in either direction. Infecting/seeding either one with the others' life is very difficult to avoid.

Ah, the sweet nostalgia of BSOD on my smartphone.

Propellers ARE anti-gravity devices, just noisy fuel-thirsty air-requiring debris-tossing anti-gravity devices.

(It occurred to me that's also how my wife describes me, minus the anti-grav part.)

Odd how certain people & parties are against fundamental (basic) research UNLESS it's spent by the military. It's often so fundamental that any resulting applications often have just as many civilian/commercial uses such that it may not matter which gov't entity sponsors it.

Well, at least we got The Internet and integrated circuits out of such. (The military was a heavy customer of early IC, sparking faster improvement, even though they were not involved in the invention itself.)
   

but I don't have faith in Congress to fund them

Let China blow a wad of money* on it. I'd rather see our money spent on an unmanned Titan boat probe, an unmanned Europa submarine, and an extra-solar (alien) planet atmosphere spectragraph "artificial eclipsing" telescope.

Approx 10% of the cost, but 5x the science, 30% of the same Wow factor (more if plant life found), and a failure would be only 3% as embarrassing as a dead Marsnaut. A friggen bargain to both Ferengi's and Vulcans: logic and greed favor the bots.

* That they get from lopsided "trade" with us

If I see one more article about STEM and young women I am gonna scream like a little girl. Coding is a high-risk career. It may pay relatively well out of college, but beyond that it is NOT a better choice than any other career. Burnout, agism, offshoring, wrist injuries, long hours, investment bubbles, etc. etc. etc. make it a risky career choice. At its best it's a stepping stone into something better, but so are a lot of other fields.

If we snooped them, they probably snooped us. Somewhere there may be a recording of the moment the ill-fated invasion of Iraq was decided:

Dick: Now that the Taliban are gone, lets smash Saddam!

Colin: What if something goes wrong? Iraq is far more populated than Afghanistan.

W: Don't worry, Colie, we whacked the Taliban real good.

Colin: Actually, we don't know where the Taliban went. Intel didn't find enough bodies to account for most. They may be hiding in caves and hills.

Dick: You worry too much. They are gone for now; let the next prez worry about them coming back out.

Colin: I don't want to foul my legacy with a war gone wrong.

W: Don't worry, Colie, Dickie is an expert on blaming it on the Dems in the off case shit comes back later. Look, I almost choked on a pretzel the other day; life is short; go for the ball now!

Dick: Amen! My mechanical heart could clack up any day, and you eat a lot of fries yourself, Tubbie.

Colin: Alright, I did have a bad feeling about this, but maybe it's just those damned fries, eh?

Dick, W, & Colin: "Onward Christian Soldiers!..."

I've seen no evidence that anybody intentionally reused and erased the space footage. More likely somebody saw them laying around and just grabbed and reused without asking or checking -- a lazy shortcut to getting their job done.