Anyone that grew up through the 40's, 50's and 60's were literally bombarded with promises of space travel, flying cars, shopping malls in space, you name it. With billions of planets to choose from the universe was all of a sudden a much bigger place.
Promises? By whom? A lot of folks, especially Science Fiction writers, were making bold predictions.
The developments in manned spaceflight in the earliest part of the 21st Century written about by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke were, alas, optimistic. So it goes.
Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
NASA wasn't into the flying cars thing, and didn't even exist for more than half of the time span you mention. They did make projections about progress in manned space exploration but their funding was cut drastically after some
very successful Apollo moon landings. They never promoted "billions of planets to choose from" as an attainable goal in the foreseeable future, as far as I know (they knew better); such wasn't even known, only speculated, in the '60s. See "the Drake equation".
Nasa makes it look so easy, yet so impossible at the same time.
They make it look easy and impossible at the same time? Man, those guys
are good! I thought it looked hard (and dangerous, as in"what could
possibly go wrong?"), but NASA made some things look
possible.
Sure John Glenn can shoot off the tip of a rocket in the 1950's going 10,000+ mph around the world 3 times backwards, but we can't even find a missing airplane in 2014.
Glenn didn't fly in space until 1962. This stuff is easy to find if you need to look it up; why don't you try doing a little fact checking
before saying something stupid. We can dream, can't we?
Why the obsession with the direction the spacecraft is pointing while it's in orbit? Exactly why does it matter? It's almost like the ones who keep bringing this up don't know the first thing about what they're whining about.
What does any of this have to do with finding an airplane that disappeared somewhere in a very large ocean, anyway?
In the 1970's they traveled to the moon in 72 hours using a calculator landing in an unknown atmosphere, and hopped in their happy little lunar module and blasted right off back to earth 220,000 miles easy peasy[citation needed].
They were also doing this in the 1960s. See the above about fact checking.
What calculator are you referring to? Much of the math was done before the flights using slide rules, some on Monroe desk calculators [plural] that could add, subtract, and multiply (and also divide if you knew how to do that on them; it wasn't simple). What couldn't be done on these was done on mainframe computers. They did have a small, dedicated-purpose, navigation computer aboard. Is that what you meant? It was much less powerful than modern general-purpose calculators, but then, it was powerful
enough for the task at hand, and that's what matters. They probably brought one or more slide rules, but I don't know for sure.
"Unknown atmosphere"? It was quite well known; there is
no atmosphere, which made things much
easier. Fact check, please.
And, no, again. They didn't "blast off" in the LM to earth. They only had to make it to the CSM, which was
much closer. Again, facts, please, not ignorant blather. It wasn't easy. At all. It did work, so I suppose from your personal experience, means it must be easy, since easy things likely are all you can accomplish.
Yet, in 2015 SpaceX can't even land a rocket on earth and Virgin Galactic can't get higher than a couple hundred thousand feet. Which seems more logical to you? That they are liars or we have actually reversed in progress over the last 50 years despite all the advances in technology?
False dichotomy. They're neither liars, nor are we regressing. Nice try, though.
Were we soft-landing boosters on earth in the Apollo years? I don't remember that? I thought they were all discarded and simply allowed to fall into the ocean. I doubt that what Space-X is attempting to do would have been even remotely feasible 40 years ago. Advances in sensors, control systems, computers, navigation, and aerodynamics make it at least potentially possible now, and they've come closer to success than I've expected.
Let's see
you get higher than a couple hundred thousand feet (physically, not figuratively... the way you write, I wonder if you're not always "high"). Since this fits into the "not easy to do" category, there's little chance
you ever will. Virgin Galactic doesn't have a fraction of the budget NASA had or even still has. They can't do as much. So what's your point?
There is a project called Persephone, led by the Icarus Interstellar foundation, who aims to achieve interstellar space travel by the year 2100. Wow wonderful, we'll all likely be dead by then.
So? No idea if this will come to pass but thank goodness not everyone thinks as small as you do.