There is one answer, that encomposes numerous reasons.
That answer is, the cold war. The Apollo Program was extremely expensive and extremely dangerous. They would never get away with what they did then, now, it's a miracle it succeded as much as it did. We the west hardly invest in space anymore because even though there is vast amounts of resources on the moon, the asteroid belt, Mars, the Jovian planets, hell, Mercury and Venus probably have quite a bit as well (Probably not enough that will ever be profitable even when we do develop the technology to extract it), space has little economic value right now. Such a shame too, we'll probably see serious advances this century (Possibly a space elevator, Mars missions, permenant moon missions, more research into making permenant space stations), hopefully a near FTL spacecraft sometime in the 22nd century. It's the most interesting thing science has left and NASA and the other important space agencies (JAXA, RKA, ESA, CSA) give little money to it. Only China is really expanding.
People may not like it but it may take China making a serious push to establish a moon colony with a quasi-millitary motive to start another space race. Pretty much a new cold war.
Quote (Subwoofer @ Aug 21 2012 03:10am)
they are called sensors. they collect data and then interpret that data into usable information.
ya know...exactly how your sight and touch works.
Rovers are extremely limited in what they can do. They need to have people there to make the real breakthroughts.
The technology exists to go there now, quicker than the Rovers got there, it's just so expensive it could bankrupt a space program if it fails. Once the technology becomes better and cheaper, they'll go.
This post was edited by Caedus on Aug 22 2012 10:19pm