I absolutely believe that, had the west not suffered such a severe cultural and industrial slowdown, we would have had enough time and resources on our hands to develop the technology required for interplanetary space travel and already have a craft made that could travel between planets at practical velocities.
Hardly. The only reason we went to the moon was as a big 'Fuck you!' to the Soviets. The heavy investment in new alloys, engines, and such could never have been justified in a commercial setting. It took the government funding the developments and then turning around and recouping some of the money by selling those break throughs to the corporate sector that allows companies like Virgin to play around with space tourism for the vastly wealthy as a mere novelty.
