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> I imagine that travel to Mars, and a moon colony seemed like it was just around the corner in 1970 and yet here we are 50 years later and neither one of those came to fruition.

It was just around the corner. The grand arc of human life altered course, and it took the market 50 years to catch up to collective action.

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Well, war and the resulting competition drove the space race. Once the Soviets and Americans decided that space wasn’t worth fighting over they spent their money elsewhere and we stopped advancing in that direction.

I usually give a lot of the credit for the recent push back into space to private companies like spaceX, but, now after making this comment part of me is wondering if I am just being naive and the real reason for space becoming a priority again is because China has started to make significant progress in their space program.

SpaceX is doing things, but I wonder if that is just result of excess capital we have on markets... Because no one honest can really calculate reasonable return of investment on things like colonisation of Mars...

I don't think so, in this case. Their initial starting capital though, that was won on tech startup lottery...

As for the Mars thing, SpaceX is funding it with their profits from boring commercial launches, and I don't think that is driven by excess capital on the market.

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