Look, the cost of keeping people in space is enormous. The idea that people will only support exploration missions if there are people aboard is just nonsense. Especially since unmanned missions are at least an order of magnitude cheaper than manned missions. We’ve had dozens of unmanned missions around the solar system. All for much less than the cost of putting three guys on the surface of Mars. Would it be cool to send human beings to Mars? Sure. And are there science missions on Mars that would be easy for a human to do but extremely hard for a robot to do? Sure. And so what?
As for the contention that we need to get into space to protect our species from extinction via asteroid impact, well, the fact is that it is literally impossible to create a self-sustaining space colony with our current technology. If you really want space colonies, forget about space colonies, we need lots of other things in place first. You’d be better off going to Nigeria and opening a school to teach little girls to read than getting a job at NASA or Boeing.
To create self-sustaining space colonies we need a planet Earth with at least an order of magnitude larger economy. We need to solve the problem that 90% of people born on this planet today have their talents squandered by working on some shithole farm or in some shithole sweatshop factory or some shithole refuge camp.
As for the notion that China or Japan (or Iran!) are on the verge of overtaking us in space, and if you want to visit the moon you better start learning Mandarin now, are just nonsensical. It turns out that getting objects into orbit is really really hard and really really expensive. China’s rapid economic expansion isn’t mysterious, and it isn’t because they’re smarter or better organized. It’s because they started from such a low level after decades of totalitarian communism. It’s like the old joke about the guy who kept hitting himself in the face with a hammer because it felt so good when he stopped. And maybe in a few decades China will achieve the economic milestone of achieving per-capita GDP parity with Mexico. And when they achieve parity with Mexico, their economy will be larger than the United States, because their population is four times larger.
But there are only so many returns you can get from stopping hitting yourself in the face with a hammer. Eventually you reach the stage of other developed countries, and there are no magic formulas beyond that. You can develop out of abject poverty by noticing the way wealthy countries operate and copying them, and noticing the way shithole countries operate and not copying them. But other than acting like a normal country instead of a shithole country, there’s no magic formula. You have to muddle along like America and Europe and Japan do.
And so we need basic science, we need basic education, we need basic human development, we need basic human rights, all over the world, before we can afford repeated trillion dollar stunts like manned missions to Mars. Or we could scrape up the money today, and work like demons for a one-shot mission. We’ll all be glad to pay higher taxes for this, right?