No one is going to invest good money in any of these schemes unless the prospects for a decent return are there. That's not what concerns me.

What I worry about is some libertarian super-optimistic space enthusiast is going to convince an elected official or a corporate executive with little technical training that great riches lie in the Expanse, ready for the plucking, and that some highly expensive but totally unproductive mission will be launched, robbing resources from other, potentially more successful operations. And the failure of that premature trip will poison the minds of policy-makers and taxpayers so that funding for more worthwhile ventures will dry up--perhaps indefinitely.

I'm sorry to harp on this so much, but I am hip to the pie-in-the-sky fantasies the "space entrepreneurs" and their sci-fi fan groupies have, how convincing they can sound, and how dangerous they can be to Mankind's exploration of space. I believe very strongly in Man's future in space, and I don't trust these pencil-necked geeks to be the ones to lead us there. These people are poison.