Finally, railroads served to connect the vast territory, and allowed mass settlement and development. Here should be our modern explorers, pushing the envelope of human knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, any government agency tends to become more bureaucratic and more averse to risk as it ages. Opening space to all of humanity will require risk-taking, something a government agency tends to avoid. Simply because it has been the answer to expanding every other major industry in history.
Industries grow only in proportion to the value they generate.
Even the Internet, which began as a government experiment in packet switching, owes its explosive growth to the fact that businesses and individuals realize value from it. In short, if people cannot make money with it, an industry will not thrive. Government is lost in space Which brings us to the current state of the space industry. Compared with other industries, relatively few companies are involved in space, and that number is shrinking through mergers and acquisitions. The reason is that most of the revenue in the industry comes from government budgets, an unsure source of revenue at best.