In principle there were oars.
Then the sails came.
Finally the engines appeared.
It was a matter of several thousands of years before Man was able to proplery control and direct his ships where he wanted.
Let's try comparing actual space-navigation to sea-navigation: which era are we in?
Well... in soars-navigation era, or even before!!
Just think of it: today we send a spacecraft out of Earth orbit.... and that's all, no way of properly driving it; we can only use "oars" time by time for some corrective maneuvers, but the ship trip is actually total dependant on streams (gravitational rather than water, but just... "streams"). We can't turn back or even just stop, we can only go ahead. And once we arrive to our destination, all we can do to stop is... wait for natural forces to stop us (atmosphere drags against spacecraft or parachute).
And I didn't mention yet HOW we get away from Earth! We need a vehicle some dozens of times bigger than our actual ship, just to be brought far enough from Earth to be "catch" by "streams"; i.e., our ship is at the beginning made up of 95% fuel / useless mass, and just 5% ship! It's like we need a 20-meters truck to bring our dinghy to the beach... with a little difference: once we get back from our trip on the ship... we can't use the truck to get home, as we discarded it!
Guys, this is really primitive! How can we just think going (again) to Moon or even to Mars with such a technology?!?
Would you ever try going from Europe to America on an oar-ship... even if you were Colombo?!? He, at least, "waited" till he had sails-navigation available!
I really think we will be eventually able to have decent space trips only once we'll have needed technology to build a spacecraft as big as a "sea-craft" (ok, "boat"...), where some dozens of people can live & work together... just like it was on Nina, Pinta & S. Maria!
40 years passed... but we are STILL thinking about going to the moon byban oars-ship with a 4 men crew!
We really need some new, good, big discovery...