Sorry. Kind of a cheap shot.

But a close examination of major government science projects shows that there is a lot more interest in pumping money to scientists and contractors than there is in actually getting a result. Classic example: Fusion power. Their motto: "Fusion: the energy of tomorrow. And always will be." They have been thirty years from a fusion reactor since I was a kid. They still are. The story of the race between the government and private sector to the human genome is also instructive.

While it is certainly true that important things have come from government-funded research, particularly in theoretical fields, most of the day-to-day advances in technology that we now enjoy (in computers for example) was privately researched and developed.

The incentives are just different. Government science projects have, as their prime function, to maintain themselves and their funding into perpetuity. That's just a fact. This largely includes NASA. Private science projects need to come up with useful and profitable results, otherwise they are just a rathole for company money.

If space exploration is left to the government, there will be probes, landers, rovers, space telescopes, research satellites, ISS crews, and other projects that will reveal many important and wonderful things about the universe. This is not chopped liver by any means, and I don't mean to imply that it is.

But if you want to see thousands of people routinely living and working in space and on other worlds, there had better be some way to make it pay. How many people live in Antarctica? Permanently? And why is this so?