No, that's a strawman. I'm specifically referring to those things we often look back and marvel at: "Wow, they ran a rocket to the moon on a computer with less power than my calculator!" and that sort of thing. We flung core memory into space, a ridiculous use of precious mass. We had no ability to computer simulate anything, which includes many things in addition to the obvious aerodynamics, like materials science computations and such.

The time that we're ready to start seriously moving into space isn't in the indefinite future, it's about now, which is I think why you're starting to see a real private "renaissance" in space (really the first time we should be going with people). The space technology that we actually had the base for was satellites, which you'd note we've made a great deal of use of.

And, well, look at what happened... we got to the moon, and, then... uh... now what? Uh... can't actually do anything. Couldn't leave robots behind, they weren't ready. Couldn't leave people behind. Couldn't do much more than toodle around in a photo-op moon buggie and bring some rocks back. Use your brain, don't just mindlessly rah-rah space travel... we got there too soon. We weren't ready to do anything except look good. We're finally getting to the point where we can seriously plan on what things we might do, and where we really are is still building the foundation we need (cheap access to space). We tried to bull ahead without building the foundation we needed, and that had the usual result.

On the topic of not mindlessly rah-rahing, let me observe that if one insists that the apex of human space travel was achieved in the 1960s, things look quite dim. Despite superficially seeming to slag on the accomplishments of the past (though if you look deeper you will observe that I've actually lined up an argument about how they are in many ways even more impressive than they seem due to being so very far ahead of their time), it's my view here that is actually the hopeful one for the future. We aren't in some sort of inevitable decay... we just got too excited and ran too far ahead, and the next 20 years ought to be great for space travel. We've finally got the resources to start making it cheap, something a corporation can do, instead of "shows up on the national budget as a top-level line item" expensive.