https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831833-000-crewed-missions-to-the-moon-and-mars-need-dreamers-and-doers/ > More than three centuries later, this flight of fancy became a reality when Neil Armstrong took one small step. “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth,” he later said. > Since then, we have come crashing back down to our little blue world. Although the International Space Station has been a success in low Earth orbit, the changing political winds have left NASA struggling to get any crewed deep-space missions off the ground. As presidents have come and gone, the agency has spent decades flipping between prioritising a pioneering trip to Mars or a return to the moon (see “Team moon vs team Mars: the battle over the future of NASA”).