However, thinking in terms of sci-fi that might just become reality, I'm actually starting to kind of understand the passing of the reigns to private corporations.
Private corporations see potential money to be made in space. They'll come up with the ideas of how to use space for non-science purposes. Which is kind of what we need.
Hopefully it'll end up working out where NASA keeps doing propulsion research with various other groups, including schools and corporations. And they can keep doing the "let's explore space to learn stuff" dance. I wholly approve of exploring space simply for the hell of it, to try and learn anything that can be learned out there. We have a ton of questions and there are some answers that can be found out there.
Problem is, we live in the real world, where governments rule. Simply appeasing our human curiosities should be enough to keep making the push in the exploration of space - but we have to face the facts, unless there is a space-cock measuring contest, governments could care less about what's out there. They think, "what we find out there is going to have no impact on our world down here, no salvation for how much we have fucked up down here."
In the real world, there has to be not only competition, but also a pressing opportunity to capitalize/own a market.
In space, there are no limits just yet. Cliche, yes, but truth. Corporations, once they achieve reliable means of establishing their own presence in space, may seek things governments have only toyed with, or perhaps only dreamed.
We need to not only learn things in space, we need to push out in space. We need to mark some territory, wave our space-peen around, show that cold vacuum who's boss 'round these parts.
Most importantly, we need to get some people off this rock, or else we doomed. Sure, we dream that eventually we'll be capable of traversing the stars and establishing massive colonies around the solar system. We have to escape dreams and actually make that attempt at some point. If we try and fail now, that's a lesson learned for future generations. We will not get things right the first time, but that can't hold us back, and thankfully, it rarely ever has.
But the way our cultures see things now, space is merely a dream for generations far off in the future - right now it's simply a cool science experiment, it serves no purpose to actually stretch out our legs in space when we have pressing matters here on Earth.
So what if this is our birth world, we can't stay here forever. There could be a comet out there with desires to crush all of our hopes and dreams in the next century. We gotta start tinkering with things we don't understand right now, if we hope to teach our kids how to not make our mistakes and prepare them to make a better attempt.
Governments are never going to give the necessary budgets to the science agencies, they don't understand the important of the future - everything is about the here and now, let the future worry about the future. Governments are short-sighted.
Corporations, well, they aren't perfect, and their foresight might be all based around the concept of making money... but at least they think about the future in slightly more realistic terms.
And with the right nurture from NASA, corporations may have a chance to do what NASA could not afford to do in anything considered near-term. Corporations can do it faster than the government.
When it comes to actually making space ours, actually colonizing and dominating every sector of space we can reach, it has to be in the hands of corporations. Governments can catch on after the fact, which in reality is the ideal course of action. Corporations completely ruling space sounds like a bad idea, but they'll get there faster, and do it bigger and better. We just have to make sure governments make the right timing and come in and take ownership once anything starts to look good. Obviously, we'll have to have some semblance of society and order out there. Hopefully by that time Earth is united under a single government.
The truest ideal is for Earth to be united under a single banner, and that government (with the budget of global commitment and cooperation of all the world's finest scientists) to take the reigns and force the issue of establishing distant colonies for various purposes. It'll still end up becoming government as usual, but at least we'll have parity, which is my ultimate point in all of this.
But of course, it'll take forever for all the dumbasses of the world to figure out uniting is actually what we need to do (and of course, they'll figure it out far too late, when we're probably already on the brink of global disaster, or worse, already in ruins and trying to clean up our mess), so we can't wait until then - let the corporations get a jump-start, maybe we'll have something good in progress that the world can get behind when it's ready to answer the call of reason and logic.
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