I'm not opposed to private space ventures, I just can't visualize any of them any time soon raising investment capital to finance a product that will have a market (except maybe the government). And when they do, sometime in the future, there will be no rich robber barons with guilty consciences who want orbiting observatories named for them, it will be a corporation that will have to justify its PR budget to the stockholders.

A lot of money has been made in space, Comsats, Landsats, and Navsats, maybe other things, but it has all started with the government taking the initial risk and developing the tech. This is not an ideological attack on the private sector, its just the nature of technology and the nature of business.

Surely you know enough about both to realize that the lack of space habitats in the Lagrangians isn't really the government's fault. Unless there is a two or three order of magnitude leap in our technology, it ain't gonna happen in this century. The commercial development of space travel will not be a rerun of the development of aviation, the business model I suspect you are subconsciously visualizing.

This is not just a new century, its a new millennium.
There will be advances in engineering, and even in physics, but I suspect the low lying fruit has already been plucked.