Yes, they do go on about it but why should it just be forgotten, ignored, not told to another generation and celebrated?
It was a great achievement by a dedicated team of scientists and communicators and programmers. The calculations were controlled by a computer with about as much power and memory space as an out-of date pocket calculator. The people who manned those spaceships faced death or worse in the vast wastes between Earth and their destination with their remains lost to their loved ones for ever.
Is that not an epic as worth recounting as the conquest of Everest or the Wild West, or the explorations of Captain Scott or Marco Polo?
So in retrospect some think we have gained nothing for all that? Not so, there have been all kinds of new perspectives (literally and metaphorically) and scientific spin-offs. Non-stick saucepans are one. At the time, it was impossible to predict the results - of course not, it was exploration of the unknown. If we never did that, we would be stuck with carrying things around on our backs instead of putting them onto containers with those new-fangled wheels on them. I bet the neighbours of the first person to cut sections of tree trunk and fix them to a box said he was wasting time playing around, as they shouldered their back-breaking burdens.
