Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
200 years from now the average school history book will have a single photo of a Falcon-9 booster landing on earth and a couple of sentencds doscroving it as the very first demonstration of reusable rocket boosters and that will be all he amounts to in the long run. Space nerds might know his name in the same way that railway nerds know of Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other railroad barrons of the 19th century, but railway nerds also remember these railroad barons of the 19th century as the robber barons they were. Honestly, it’s not the worst fate that the relentless passage of time can give to a person