Obviously the US has been willfully deceiving folks about what spaceflight means for all of these decades. And they have been doing it because they desperately wanted to show they could 'match' the Russians by sending a man into 'space.' And the reason they could get away with this is because they knew that the majority of folks simply don't have any knowledge of physics.
[moonofalabama.org]
David Freiheit has a saying, "Politics ruins everything." We can see that even applies to aerospace engineering and "space flight."