Do you ever wonder how people felt when they say Magellan or Captain Cook set off? Or, when they watched the Apollo missions happen? I'm guessing that this is what it felt like. We're at the dawn of a new space age.
Yeah, I do wonder: https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?t=24
I think how they feel probably depends on their perspective, their financial situation, their susceptibility to public relations, and so on. Let's say everything goes "great," and there are a million people living on Mars in 50 years. Will it matter to people dying in a war, or ailing next to an open sewer, or what-have-you back on Earth that there's some depressed Martians trapped in smelly cans and covered in perchlorate- and iron-laden dust 4 to 12 light minutes away? I don't think it will.
I think that when many of us "wonder" or "imagine" what people felt like when they watched or participated in these events, what we're really doing is projecting the relief and and other pleasant emotions that we experience when we imagine them, when we use imagining them as an escape fantasy to cope with our own anxieties, to that imagined audience.
Frank Borman actually went to the Moon, and his feelings about it, are definitely situated inside of his own perspective: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/655/the-not-so-great-unknow...
It's probably important for us to face this phenomenon square on, to check in with what's really going on with our "dreams of space" or sense of Solar "manifest destiny." There's a reason that space-age propaganda seems so successful, both in its own time, where its object was removed from us only by the impassable gulf of 10 km/s, and now, when it is behind the second impassable gulf of nearly 60 years. If that reason is escapism, we should possibly check in with what it is we think we're escaping from, what we actually, really, fear. If our hope is in a fantasy, perhaps it indicates that we feel our reality is hopeless.