Is space exploration ever going to become economically viable?
Answer:
It already is. Communications satellites and GPS have become cash cows. Satellite mapping is being used for agriculture and mining as well as other applications. Richard Branson is building space tourism into a profit making business. Many NASA space projects have done preliminary work for applications that may be profitable. Research and Development projects do not usually come with guarantees but space exploration has endless possibilities. NASA, ESA, Japan, China, Russia, India, and private industry are all betting heavily on the future of space exploration.
Eventually--there is a lot that has to happen to get the costs down to make it more practical, and we have to find an economic reason to explore. It will probably be hundreds of years before you have young men trying to make a fortune in asteroid mining, or someone figures out how to farm on Mars, and someone has to beat the gravity well of earth (maybe with a giant elevator) in order to make space travel profitable, but it will happen eventually unless we destroy ourselves first. There are over a million new guys on the planet every day--eventually we'll run out of real estate.
Ya- I sink in zee year 4780 - zee worlt should be breaking even in dis area as you can plainly see in zee space exploration equation E=MC2. Ya, ya, I know - de equation has been misinterpreted many times - but it is and always has been the answer to your most importan question.
Yours Truly - A. Einstein
Eventually, not anytime in the near future. Once the benefits of exploration (extracting minerals on other planets, collecting hydrogen gas, etc) outweigh the costs of exploring, it will be.
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