Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. And for big players, the cost of travel itself will approach 0% of total costs. So basically the future of space is going to be decided by who can most effectively leverage this new frontier that's suddenly becoming completely accessible.
In a way there are some analogs with the internet. We're in that critical early phase where really good ideas, like selling books online, should still sound pretty stupid to most people. One thing that's very different though is that the change is not even remotely linear. We're going from room-sized glorified calculators to high powered laptops, practically overnight.
We're already at a point where - at least using companies in the UK - it costs about the same to launch a cubesat as it does to buy a poverty-spec cloth-seats-no-aircon Ford Focus.
It's mad that I could launch a 10cm 1kg cubesat - think in terms of a bag of sugar - for so little money, and all I need to do is ring a guy a couple of hour's drive south in Glasgow and wave a credit card to do it.
It costs £40 per person to travel from Glasgow to Dundee even booking in advance, making it slightly more expensive for one journey for one person than the cheapest car I've ever bought - and roughly the same price as a tank of LPG in my old Range Rover.
Disclaimer: I've lost a lot of the language behind the original argument, but as a sceptic it did make a lot of sense to me at that time. And hopefully the meaning behind the original message has not been lost due to my bad phrasing.
The copper monopolist. His name is easy to remember,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Fugger
(Some crossover: the bio says he was a major investor in some of those spice-route-seeking expeditions, possibly including Magellan's).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_lunar_sample_display
Assuming it wasn't lost or stolen since 1970, I wonder what the Taliban is doing with its moon rock.
https://www.jn.pt/nacional/portugal-teve-uma-rocha-lunar-mas...
So next time some suspicious character in Lisbon, proposes to sell you a piece of the Moon...it might be real.
What would you be mining on the moon and what for?
I have no idea. One movie suggested H3. Others think mining water ice would be an idea. Others think you can use the regolith to 3D print stuff. I'm not the private company launching lunar landers, but I was just making up hypotheticals on why someone might want to practice landing things on the moon.
Imagine that I told you that I have a new venture to mine slate in the arctic. And when asked I would tell you that it is very expensive to transport slate from the already existing mines to the arctic, which makes the arctic mined slate that much more valuable. You would immediately see that this is true, as long as there is someone who wants slate in the arctic, and very much not true if there is nobody there who needs pretty roofs or blackboards.
Somehow with space this is less obvious?
But you can set up low/zero g manufacturing on/near the moon, military installations, incredible observatories, and unique tourist facilities.
You can also set up space habs / moon bases for people to live in in the far future which would spread our bets as a species in a way that living in the arctic doesn't.
https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services
This mission itself is in preparation for future missions contracted by NASA
The reason I say it's the wrong direction is not only the lack of ambition, but cost! Artemis is planned to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just absurd given our trajectory with space. This (back to the topic of this thread) company sent their rover to the moon on a $67 million SpaceX launch. Add the cost of their rover and operations, and it's likely this entire project, of landing a rover on the moon, cost less than $0.1 billion.
The future of space belongs to whoever can get these costs down as much as possible. Because the goals are big - like industrializing the Moon. Water is enough to make rocket fuel, simple raw resources can be exploited to develop things in a near 0-g environment, and so on. At NASA level costs these sort of concepts would bankrupt the entire country. So it's going to be whichever entity/nation can operate most cost-effectively that will decide the future of space. And, for better or for worse, I know who I'd expect to win that game.