Perhaps what I am really getting at is that NASA should have started with
a slow and steady progression of creating a more-or-less permanent
infrastructure in space, starting with a space station built and resupplied
by a reusable spacecraft, then used the space station as a base to send
missions to the Moon and other worlds.

Instead they went for the crash manned programs, putting humans in
capsules to compete with the Soviets, who did not have the skills or
technology to do anything more advanced at the time.

If we had focused on Dyna-Soar or the X-15 or something that could
have come from them, we would have the space program once envisioned:

Real space stations with real purposes, science bases and perhaps even
colonies on the Moon and Mars, and perhaps even tourists on real space
vacations.

Instead we had a "throw away" space program, which, when the political
winds changed and the public got bored, that is exactly what we did to it.

We are only now beginning to catch up to where we should have been decades
ago, but even this remains to be seen if the momentum can be maintained.

People are showing their lack of historical understanding, their short term
memories, and their fickleness over what they see as the latest "trends"
and "fads".

The exploration and utilization of space is not a fad. It is the difference
between our species reaching and exceeding its potenials or eventually
either destroying ourselves outright or through stagnation and decay.