I'm always puzzled why people write things like "people have been wanting to explore the stars for hundreds/thousands/million of years." This is absolutely categorically false. Until the late 19th century, the stars were for nearly everyone alive just points of light in the night sky. For almost a thousand years, religious dogma in the West taught that they were points on giant crystal spheres. Obviously, nobody dreamed of "exploring" them.

This "we all want to explore space" fallacy is a special case of a more general fallacy: the notion that humans are natural explorers. In reality, DNA evidence clearly shows that for 99.9999% of human history (e.g. until the advent of cheap commercial air travel) nearly everyone was born, lived, and died within a 5 kilometer radius. People are natural stay-at-home creatures, not explorers. Yes, a tiny number of people have been explorers, but extrapolating from unusual cases is simply a demonstration of inadequate cognition, not the presentation of a valid argument.