The majority of people didn't care about people like the Wright brothers trying to fly. Apathy is not new to humanity at all. You need to realise that people haven't stopped dreaming, it's that we're dreaming about things that are even more difficult to do. Going to the moon is hard, going to Mars makes it look like a picnic, you have SO many other variables to take into account that it's mind boggling. To me it feels like the simpler, yet still difficult things have been done, the more complex, in-depth ideas are going to take a little more time to work on.
Out of curiosity, how long long were we interested (in the sense of having NASA focus on it) in going to the moon before we actually made it up there? So you're saying we've just set our goals so high, a lot of us are just losing patience with how long it's been since we've seen progress?
The only reason America went to the moon was because we sent Sputnik into space and the Americans got scared (I'm Ukrainian so I'm kind of from the other side of the coin here). We didn't do much else so when they realized that they stopped giving a damn. It's pathetic, really. America just wanted to win.
There wasn't any serious interest in the moon before Sputnik? Yeah...America isn't really all it's cracked up to be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc Here, watch this.
I've seen this before actually. I just wasn't sure if it was solely Sputnik or not.