Mhaze.

The fundamental differences in opinion are irreconcilable so I’ll summarise my last response:

I think we’ve now identified the real difference between our positions.

You are concerned that Australia will miss out on the future benefits of space development if it fails to participate. That’s a legitimate concern, and I accept that technological advances can produce benefits far beyond their original purpose.

But the possibility of future benefits doesn’t settle the question of how Australian taxpayers’ money should be allocated today.

Your argument assumes that the benefits will eventually flow down to Australia and that participation now is worth the cost. Those are propositions that require evidence, not simply confidence in technological progress.

My argument is not that Australia should abandon space. It is that government investment in commercial space development should be assessed against its expected public return, the risks carried by taxpayers, who captures the benefits, and the opportunity cost of competing public investments.

Nor does the fact that Australia might lag behind the US or China mean that every attempt to catch up is economically justified.

We agree that technological progress matters. We differ over what that establishes about government spending.

The potential value of a technology is one question. Whether a particular expenditure of public money is justified is another.

That distinction remains my original point!

"You are concerned that Australia will miss out on the future benefits of space development if it fails to participate. "

No that's not my position at all. Australia has already been left behind and won't caught up for decades if ever. It'd be nice if we used the new lower costs of putting stuff in space to help solve some of our problems but I'm not fused either way.

My position is about humanity in general, not Australia in particular. Humanity took a giant leap forward with Starship 13 and I was simply pointing that out. And it was all done by the private sector. And its going to accelerate. SpaceX is now building, with private funds, a gigantic factory to make many many more Starship which will result in many many more launches of these history changing rockets.

What Australia does about this new world wasn't my point. If Australia decides it'd rather spend money elsewhere and let the space revolution pass it by, so be it. The world that SpaceX is creating will move on and Australia will look on, askant

Fair enough: Your original point was that Starship represents a potentially historic advance for humanity, achieved through private-sector initiative, and that its development will continue regardless of what Australia chooses to do.

I don’t dispute the potential significance of that achievement, nor the right of private enterprise to pursue it.

My argument was and still is, how governments should allocate scarce taxpayer resources when technological ambitions such as this current example, compete with immediate social needs.

Equally, the fact that a technological development may benefit humanity doesn’t, by itself, settle the separate question of whether a government should fund particular activities associated with it. That is a personal decision.

Perhaps then, the distinction is simply this: You’re interested in the possibilities Starship may open up for humanity, whereas I’m interested in the public-policy choices governments make in response to technological developments.

Those are different questions, and we need not to resolve one in order to acknowledge the significance of the other.

I'm not advocating for government, either here or overseas, to get into funding of the space industry in general or SpaceX in particular. Indeed I'd want government to stay out of it as much as possible.

The main reason why SpaceX has been wildly successful while NASA and the European Space Agency and the various Chinese space organisations are struggling to keep up, is that SpaceX was determined to do it without government 'help' which too often becomes government interference.