Their reality check needs a reality check of it's own.
The trip to the moon was about 240k miles one way. That's about 10 times the circumference of our planet. Fairly comprehensible numbers.
The trip to our nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is about 4.3 light years, or 252,700,000,000,00 miles. That's a bit over 100 million times the distance to our moon. To put it another way, the logistics of making a trip to Proxima Centauri are about 100 million times more challenging than making a trip to our moon.
We need some incredible, ie revolutionary, breakthroughs in Research and Development. I can understand the desire to reach for the stars, but we haven't even put a man on another planet in our own Solar system yet. I think a good analogy would be something like Columbus talking to the queen about planning a trip to the moon before he even made it across the ocean to the new world.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that we should be focusing more on just returning to the moon and establishing a completely self-sufficient base of operations there before even setting our sights on a target like Mars. The only trouble with that is it just doesn't capture the interest of the general public, so it becomes difficult to drum up support and funding for such an endeavor.