"Clearly you're missing the point of Simberg's article. Instead of mouthing platitudes, ask yourself why do we need to lower costs?; & to what benefit? To allow people to go on jolly jaunts to LEO?"

Yes, jolly jaunts to LEO could be one benefit. Other benefits would be harvesting solar power, mining asteriods, preventing asteriods from hitting earth, colonizing worlds, and this is by no means the limit of the value obtainable from space.
Perhaps, you would care to explain how our future could not involve space exploration. I have hard time envisioning a prosperous human civilization in which will are confined to this planet until the day our sun turns into a red gaint and thereby terminating all life on this planet [heck, if you could somehow see a prosperous future in which we aren't spacefaring within the next 1000 years that would be sufficent]. One little point we are already gaining large benefits from using the space environment- weather sats, etc. So if you want to *pull back* we would of course lose these benefits- and also the miltary won't be very keen on the idea.

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I have no comment on the rest of your post other than to say it had little to do with what Simberg was discussing- contrary to your assertion.