I think government space flight is a dead end, but for economic reasons foremost.
NASA can only take a politically-bounded slice of a fixed size tax pie. It spends the money it was allocated and comes back with empty hands. Unless the USA is in a military-driven space race with a superpower rival, it's going to get the crumbs and it has no way of getting more than that. Success does not breed success, only photo-ops. If the photo-ops get stale, success can breed apathy and abandonment.
A commercial space company comes back from each successful flight with more money than it set out. It causes the economy to grow, actually increasing the size of the pie, and the slice it gets is investment-bounded. Success will bring more investment. There is no political upper limit on how high it can scale.
An interplanetary culture is going to require utterly enormous amounts of wealth by modern standards - only commerce has the potential to create that much wealth.
I just hope we can get started with the asteroid mining for rare earth metals before we run out of the rare earth metals to build computers that will get us there.
NASA can only take a politically-bounded slice of a fixed size tax pie. It spends the money it was allocated and comes back with empty hands. Unless the USA is in a military-driven space race with a superpower rival, it's going to get the crumbs and it has no way of getting more than that. Success does not breed success, only photo-ops. If the photo-ops get stale, success can breed apathy and abandonment.
A commercial space company comes back from each successful flight with more money than it set out. It causes the economy to grow, actually increasing the size of the pie, and the slice it gets is investment-bounded. Success will bring more investment. There is no political upper limit on how high it can scale.
An interplanetary culture is going to require utterly enormous amounts of wealth by modern standards - only commerce has the potential to create that much wealth.