>> “It was not until planes started flying folks to a destination that the aviation industry exploded!”
Agree with the rest - but it was really WW I and WW II that put the tech into commercial aviation. Which brings us back to the orginal premise - that only governments have the will and resources to take the risks and fund the tech.
Had the two wars never occurred, jet planes would be on the cover of Popular Science as the plane of the future. Necessity drives invention and adoption. Absent either, things move very slow in the tech world. <<
So they only way we could ever hope to achieve space dominance is if China decides to start WW-III and uses Space as a High Frontier and we have to play catchup. Too bad our manufacturing sector is in the crapper. Time to learn Mandarin, sadly...
Sadly that may be the case - certainly the US abandoning manned space travel above LEO will leave the field clear for any other nation to claim whatever body they deem worthwhile for whatever reason.
Whatever tech that is developed will be the property of those nations, we, on the other hand, can ask (beg) for licences they own. Worse, any US kids that have ambitions in those directions will emigrate to those countries where the opportunities exist. This is the beginning of a great side down - Hussein is just greasing the skids - dumb voters are more important to the Dems than national supremacy or pride.