"it’s that we seemingly want to kill aspiration"

Space, apart for robotic scientific research is a complete waste.

The canard about all the collateral inventions, etc. is largely nonsense and arose only when NASA (and its dependent sub-contractors) had their budgets threatened. 90% of everything that is claimed to have come out of the space programs was work that was underway. NASA simply supplied a large funding infusion.

Which leads to providing the following intellectual "revelation": Solving problems is done way better when given the funding and the focus. Giving people money to do one thing that may or may not supply funding for solving problems is laughable approach. It's like saying, we'll cure cancer faster by sending people into space. But that's what's being promoted.

As for Bezos et al., this is a case of too shallow of an understanding of the difference between ego and value. He's just 7 years younger than me and was therefore raised with the onslaught of space SciFi: "Back to the Future", "Starwars", "Star Trek Next Gen", and a vast number of other space fantasies. This combined with the fact that Ronald Reagan was his first exposure to our political culture. This has led him and legions of other intellectually shallow folks to just follow their first childhoods with their second ones.

The result of this will be billions of dollars and vast amounts of engineering and organizational talent going into something that provides almost nothing for what is needed at the moment: a singular and comprehensive focus on figuring out how to survive the next 50 years and retain something of a functioning earth.

So while billionaires dream of realizing their childhood toys, whole ecosystems are collapsing, species are being annihilated at an increasing pace and there is a question of whether we and the earth that Jeff grew up in will not survive his children's lifetimes. Some aspiration.