Well, where to begin.

1)"No historical evidence, no social science evidence, and no genetic evidence prove that human beings have an innate, universal compulsion to explore."

Uhh, excuse me. Most life has the compulsion to explore. In mammals we call it curiosity. It is a natural outgrowth of evolutionary successful selection pressures. I'm astounded that they make such a statement. Of course we also have the ability to make tradeoffs. We have the opportunity to explore in many different ways and in many different areas for different costs.

2)"Human presence will always be more expensive than remote operations, so any genuine space-based extractive business is likely to be heavily based on remote presence. Therefore technology and economic development are secondary objectives of human spaceflight."

I agree with this one. Ironically, I believe the fastest way to get significant human presence in space is to move most of the resources to robotic development. When remote presence is successful enough to "relatively" economically build bases, and extract resources, and in general largely support human life off planet, then is the time to seed human beings off planet.

Where I disagree is their rejection of a resource driven, try to pay the way for human epxloration and just capitulate completely to the idea of human spaceflight for prestige purposes. We are doomed to make the wrong tradeoffs over and over as long as this mindset is maintained.

While they discounted NASA as an effective jobs program, the internals of NASA is largely builty around lobbying of the main aerospace companies that get the contracts. They make no suggestions as to how to break this lobby to get more effective policies.

Omissions:
1) I believe they skirted the issue of planting flags. At one time the regions such as our north and south poles were not considered valuable. Now of course they are coveted for their resources and even recently there has been a spate of symbolic flag planting to bolster claims. I do believe at some level we are forced to go to the moon just to protect our long term interests. We cannot allow other powers such as Russia and China and even India to make unilateral claims to the moon and other extraplanetary bodies. Whether this requires actual human exploration, I leave to the space lawyers.

2) No mention of private space exploration and space tourism (unless I missed it in my quick scan). This paper was completely NASA centric as other governmental space programs were mentioned, but I don't think there was any mention of private endeavors and their possible impact/synergy to human spaceflight. I consider this a very serious omission as things like orbital hotels might be the seed for truly economically self sustaining human spaceflight.