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Jamil 37I agree that nasa in the form it has taken in the last 20 yrs was little more then poialictl boondoggle. They still had phenomenal talent though.one of Nasa's many problems was that it was also used as a military space program and it was forced to dual purpose many of their projects which usually means no one gets what they really wanted from the project.Unfortunately a space program like that that existed during mercury and Apollo is unlikely to occur in a government program again. As such you are probably right that any hopes along those lines would have to come from civilian operations.if someone was willing to work with a 20 year return on investment, asteroid mining could easily be a profitable venture if you are OK with losing a few astronauts along the way. Playing on the bleeding edge is risky. It could also be interesting to have someone run the numbers and see if private space telescopes & research satellites could profitable by selling the info to governments and universities. Without the politics they could probably get the projects up and running in less time and cheaper.