Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.

Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It's not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks.

If you're going to lead a space frontier, it has to be government; it'll never be private enterprise. Because the space frontier is dangerous, and it's expensive, and it has unquantified risks. And under those conditions, you cannot establish a capital-market evaluation of that enterprise. You can't get investors.

Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program.

Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival.

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans.