I'm sure they didn't. But in the years following the invention of the airplane, technological advancements and innovations flowed at a natural rate. Commercial airlines sprang up throughout the 1910s and 20s. Flight quickly became a key element of warfare. The jumbo jet wouldn't come around for a long time, true, but thousands of people all over the world were still directly witnessing and taking part in the phenomenon, all within just a few decades of the invention.
In contrast, commercial space travel is stagnant. It's been over sixty years since the first man supposedly flew in space, and yet the prospect is still as extraordinarily expensive, risky, and tightly-regulated as ever. What progress have these space entrepreneurs made? How are they any closer to launching space tourism as a viable industry than when Hughes first hawked the idea?
I'm not really sure what point you're making. When I was a kid we used to dream about moon bases and flying cars. Hasn't happened.
There was talk of cold fusion which would produce limitless clean energy. That hasn't happened either.
We used to dream about robot servants and automated houses and that is closer to reality.
I guess my point is some technical problems simply turn out to be harder to solve than others and it's next to impossible to predict these things.
The aviation industry has gone backwards in terms of speed - Concorde was in the 60s and nothing since has been anywhere near as fast.
Why? Because it is fundamentally difficult and expensive to accelerate large things to high speeds.
F=ma
For an object with a large mass - like an airplane or rocket - you need a LOT of F to generate that a. And we still don't have a particularly efficient way of generating that.
Where the airline industry has progressed though is comfort and entertainment. Having a screen in the back of the seat in front of you on which you can choose to show a load of films, TV shows or play music was the stuff of dreams when I first started flying, now it's routine.
Technology often advances quickly in times of war when a lot of resources are put into research. The Space Race came out of the Cold War and two super-powers trying to gain dominance of space.
I don't entirely agree that commercial space travel is stagnant. 7 "space tourists" have now visited the ISS. Now companies like Virgin are in the race it will happen if it is commercially viable. I'd say it's closer to reality than it was when I was a kid.