Hey, you're preaching to the choir. I want to go, even if I have to pay for my own ticket.

"Find a way to make money out there and the investment will be made." You've answered your own question, its up to the business community to do this, not government. The government can discover, explore, even survey, but sooner or later business has to actually step up and do it.

The riches are there all right, with few of the messy drawbacks, as you point out. The problem is convincing investors today it is worth their while. I just don't see that happening any time soon, and certainly not now. (And I mean REAL investment, leading to bases, settlements, colonies, not get rich quick schemes like tourism). At any rate, we are not going to settle this argument by talking about it. It will be settled by the market. When the corporations start populating the solar system and the permanent offworld habitats start getting constructed, then the argument will be over.

As for the economic viability of the Age of Exploration, of course it paid off big time--in the long run. But the original investors who fronted the money often lost their shirts, and usually, the success stories were totally unanticipated and greatly delayed.

The big success of contemporary government space programs has been scientific. Comsats, GPS and imagery notwithstanding, no investor would have spent millions for Hubble, Chandra, Kepler, Spitzer, IRAS, Hipparchos/Tyco or any of the other great space observatories that have revolutionized astronomy. And although basic research always pays off eventually, none of these has made a nickel in returns yet.

The Gilded Age tycoons who financed the great reflectors that made the 20th century explosion in astronomy possible were philanthropists, astronomy was their hobby, and they spent their own money on Hamilton, Wilson, Palomar. Modern corporations have to justify their charitable activities to their stockholders.

I simply do not see that the wealth of space will become accessible enough for earth-bound investors to become interested in it any time soon. Only government will be available to carry out that role for the forseeable future. And so far, at least for those scientific applications, it hasn't done too badly.

El Dorado is out there, but it's a lot further off than we thought.