Sell the SLS/Artemis/Orion program to me

[Radar]

I would say it's long past the time for that. The Apollo Program was 50 years ago. So far, we've sunk Skylab and are about to sink the ISS, space colonisation shouldn't be science fiction at this point, but it still is. Space: 1999 was a TV series in the 1970s. We still aren't anywhere near that advanced in space colonisation.

We also should have hoverboards and flying cars long time ago among other inventions. Thing is, just like with fusion power plants the old estimations of the future did not account for how complicated some of the tasks are. More often than not, writers creating those SF series did not even bother with specific estimates - they wanted something for their story, so they put it in. On the other hand, we had many completely unforeseen advancements that are far beyond what old SF writers or futurologists predicted.

Right now most of technological progress is driven by the economy - if it is profitable, there will be money invested in it. So far, space colonization is not going anywhere for two reasons:
1. We still did not figure out how to keep people safe and healthy out there for longer periods of time. And this is not a single problem - there are loads of serious issues with it.
2. Investments would need to be huge and possible gains very unsure and in a too long time to consider, if there are better options available.

It is kind of sad that we went to the moon, and then...stopped. But at least there's now hope for a resumption of it.

Moon exploration and the whole space race was a political game of one-upmanship between USA and USSR. Once that political drive went away it stopped as there was no more reason to funnel piles of money into it.

For scientific purposes probes are far better and - more importantly - cheaper. So we did a lot of stuff like landing probes on different planets, moons and comets. Sending missions beyond the solar system (thanks to a very favorable alignment of planets), others close to the sun... We also greatly increased our capabilities of observing the universe remotely with ever-better telescopes and recently we even started detecting gravity waves. Since scientific funds are always scarce, cost-efficiency is always a top priority. So there is not much going on with human missions. Now private ventures are in the space game, so things are changing again as rich people have different priorities and are again in a game of one-upmanship with each other (remember the race between space companies to go to space?) and/or trying make a name for themselves in history. Let's see where it leads us.