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Being European also, I honestly am not in favour of it. The amount of public money that flows into these ventures without well defined purpose in a time where we're hitting 20% unemployment due to a pandemic seems grotesque to me. There's a lot more things to fix on this planet.

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Unemployment and poverty are always going to be there and never be 100% removed. Not in the near future.

Wouldn’t starting a space mission create thousands of direct and indirect jobs?

These advancements are not taking money away from them. The research we did towards all of the space travel in the past 6 decades have given us dividends on several fronts.

There's obviously spill over happening from these things I don't ignore that completely, but if we're going that way I'd honestly rather see the money and manpower go towards terrestrial science that focusses on improving our lot here. There's opportunity cost there. With billions of dollars you can fund a lot of vaccines or infrastructure or science that helps people in more tangible ways.

Seeing people talking about going to Mars or building space hotels with the situation around the world seems more ghoulish to me than anything else.

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