Actually, we first landed on Mars with the Viking series of probes in 1976. Then there was a whole lot of time where we didn’t do anything before we started again with Mars in the late 90s.

We have even figured out aviation on mars so thats kinda cool :D

We reached Mars with probes 50 years ago. I'm not in any way trying to denigrate the amazing achievements of the Mars rovers. But the fact remains that a human crew could have done all that and more (like drill a hole) in a few weeks at best.

Actually the rate of major mission launches and new "firsts" was highest in the late 60s/70s, slowed significantly in the 80s/early 90s, and resumed at a moderate and consistent pace from the mid-90s until today (although today missions became far more complex and focused on detailed science rather than just achieving things).

All the smart people went to build computers instead of rockets, and now we have smartphones and the internet.

I work in software, most of my peers are not spacefaring material. The issue is budget and ability/desire to do things that are bold instead of sending robots up there.

They followed the money. The US Congress saddled NASA with a mandate for a Shuttle without funding it properly. The Russians never even developed crewed rockets that could do anything interesting beyond LEO. Everyone else wasn't doing much until the last decade or so.

There have long been plenty of smart people at NASA, and they're wasted on poor funding and management. It has nothing to do with IT.

The bigger issue is that there isn't much point to having humans in space.

After the Wright Brothers flight, aviation took off because aviation is genuinely useful. First it was mostly for delivering mail, but that was an incredible change. Instead of a letter taking weeks to get somewhere it would take days. Places that used to be completely isolated from communication now had an easy way to keep in touch. Then with passengers aviation you had something that changes the world in a positive and measurable way.

Humans in space is extremely expensive and there really isn't much worthwhile to do up there. Sure, you can do some science experiments about how zero gravity affects something, and learning things is useful, but there's no obvious immediate payoff. If going into space made your bones stronger and not weaker, space travel would have developed massively because there would be a reason for millions of people to go to space for the health benefits. Or, if ballistic travel made sense economically, there might be rockets that cut the travel time from New York to Melbourne down to a couple of hours. But, having to get all that mass above the atmosphere means that it's far too costly to make economic sense.

People talk about mining asteroids or the moon, but there really isn't much that's valuable up there. The moon is mostly made of ~~cheese~~ [wait, my sources need updating] lunar regolith, which is composed of elements that are just as common on earth: silicon, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, iron, etc. But, on earth you don't have to deal with the difficulty of processing it on another celestial body, nor do you have to deal with the spiky, unweathered nature of regolith that means it destroys space suits and machines.

The only reason the US landed on the moon with humans in the first place is that it was in a dick measuring contest with the USSR. Now that the cold war is over, nobody's willing to pay for something that useless.

That's why getting to the moon permanently is so important. Once we get in situ resource utilisation going, the rest of the solar system becomes much more accessible.

Yeah you're right, there was no such thing as stock markets until 2010 I heard

Before capitalism was invented in 2010 we were just guided by happiness and the pursuit of science and art and improving our livelihoods 🥰