Yep, plus the moon was about as far as we could go anyway (manned) and the great majority of people would not want to pay for any more of those visits; the last planned mission to the moon was cancelled, and the last few generated relatively little interest. I am not saying it is a good or a bad idea, merely pointing out what is likely to be funded.
For all the chatter about sending a man (men? people?) to Mars, it is just not w/in our technical capabilities at this time nor in the foreseeable future. And that is the close place after our own moon, all the other places are much, much farther away and so further outside our abilities.
But yeah, the unmanned probes have given us a tremendous amount of information, especially if we stop and think that all of them were made / launched long ago and so made with vastly inferior technology. The Voyager probes had gold plated RECORDS on them! State of the art in the 1970's.
So those things combined have sort of ended our space program I think, at least the outer space program (not counting things we put into our own orbit). And honestly, I cannot see any manned trips to anywhere in the next couple of decades, probably longer than that.
Brian
Good stuff! I'm sad that NASA is no longer maned mission capable but there is no doubt that unmanned missions give us WAY more science for the buck.