I thought I made the point (extremely well) that the successes of private enterprise are due to its failures. Its just natural selection, every successful organism is the result of trial and error, the end result of the deaths of critters who weren't successful. You have to experience failures in order to learn.

But its all a moot point anyway. There is nothing in space to attract private investment! If there were gold (or platinum, or plutonium) ingots neatly piled up on the moon's surface it would cost too much to go there and bring them back. Until some unobtanium propulsion system is developed that will make travel in and out of gravity wells cheap, the idea of developing off-planet resources is a space cadet fantasy.

There are successful and profitable space businesses; telecommunications, earth resources,
geosciences, military, navigation, but they were all initially developed by massive government subsidies. And its always been like this, back in Columbus' day, he still had to get his ships financed by the Spanish Crown. Even the known wealth of the spice islands and the negro slave coast couldn't attract enough investment to get the ball rolling. The Portuguese and the Spanish bootstrapped this exploration with government subsidies. Later, when the rumors of gold and dope (sugar, coffee, cocoa, tea, tobacco) started paying off did private investment jump in, and then only in a collective way through the devlopment of companies and market shares.

The only way space travel is going to pay for itself is either some magic new propulsion system will be discovered to make it cheaper, or some fabulously valuable substance we haven't found yet will be discovered. Right now, we're spending a lot of government dollars trying to find life in space, because an alternative biology will kick start a whole new plastics and chemicals industry. But the "investment" is all from the taxpayer. If we found life on Mars, or in the ice oceans of the outer satellites, then you would see a veritable gold rush of nations and companies scrambling to get in the game. Until then, nothing is going to happen in the private sector.

I'm not slamming private enterprise, I certainly don't blame them for not spending money in this area. I certainly wouldn't invest in a company that was! Speculation like this is why we have governments.

I still support space exploration because I am convinced there is SOMETHING out there worth going after. Maybe it will be microbes in the Martian soil, or brine shrimp from Europa, or an alien extrasolar derelict in the asteroid belt. But until they find it, there will be little investment from the corporate sector. True, individual space groupies like Musk or Bezos may invest their own private fortunes looking for it, but there will be no broad spectrum corporate interest in it. People and governments take bold risks. Companies don't.