That's the conceit for the tv show For All Mankind - what if the space race didn't end? But I don't buy it, IMO the space race ended for material reasons rather than political. Space is just too hard and there is not much of value "out there". But regardless, it's a futile excuse, markets and politics should be part of any serious prognostication.

I think it was a combination of the two. The Apollo program was never popular. It took up an enormous portion of the federal budget, which the Republicans argued was fiscally unwise and the Democrats argued that the money should have been used to fund domestic social programs. In 1962, the New York Times noted that the projected Apollo program budget could have instead been used to create over 100 universities of a similar size to Harvard, build millions of homes, replace hundreds of worn-out schools, build hundreds of hospitals, and fund disease research. The Apollo program's popularity peaked at 53% just after the moon landing, and by April 1970 it was back down to 40%. It wasn't until the mid-80s that the majority of Americans thought that the Apollo program was worth it. Because of all this, I think it's inevitable that the Apollo program would wind down once it had achieved its goal of national prestige.

I think the space race ended because we got all the benefit available, which wasn’t really in space anyway, it was the ancillary technical developments like computers, navigation, simulation, incredible tolerances in machining, material science, etc.

We’re seeing a resurgence in space because there is actually value in space itself, in a way that scales beyond just telecom satellites. Suddenly there are good reasons to want to launch 500 times a year.

There was just a 50-year discontinuity between the two phases.