OP never said they liked spaceflight. They also didn't say anything about addressing human needs. They just said "hard tech golden age". So I think you are looking for a fight that isn't there.
But anyway; let's take it at the best case curiosity. I do like spaceflight. Is it a problem to you what people like? Does everything you like specifically address human needs? I find this confusing.
Regardless, all life on Earth is going to die. I see it as a "major human need" to avoid death of our civilization and all other life we know of in the whole universe, if it becomes possible. And it does seem more possible now - because of the advances SpaceX has made with hard rocket tech in the last few years, specifically.
I would say that space flight is cool as a potential experience -- I hope that it's safe and cheap enough one day that I can go -- and I also think that life is good [0], so if we can spread life to more planets, that's good.
Even if you don't enjoy the science/exploration angle, asteroid mining should be incredibly good for human needs.
Any metal you can think of exists in phenomenal abundance there, and should be able to be exploited at minimal cost in the long run. Having huge supplies of cheap platinum, gold, nickel, cobalt etc would be extremely good for humanity. It also means we don't need to have dirty and ugly mines on earth.
There is also the military angle. If the west lets China control orbit, we're in big trouble.
Asteroid mining is wildly uneconomical. There is no material to be found in large quantities on any asteroid in the solar system whose value justifies the development and installation costs of the infrastructure needed to get that material back to Earth.
If you're building a megastructure in space, that's a different story. But please understand that mining gold or platinum from asteroids, at (literally) astronomical cost, will not do anything to advance the state of life on Earth except, at best, reduce the price of gold and platinum, which are not societal bottlenecks.
It is 100% guaranteed that, at some point in the (geologically) near future, humanity will need to leave Earth permanently, or move the planet or something to that effect if we really want to.
We should be beyond ready by the time that comes. It's not an immediate or daily human need, but it IS a human need.
The sun is heating up, and Earth is going to become too hot. I’m not sure on the timeline; might be a few hundred million years. Might be more. It depends on how the atmosphere reacts.
On that timescale we could use a gravitational tractor to fix it, if we insist keeping the planet around.
250 million years is an estimate for when the formation of a new supercontinent results in sufficient volcanic activity to drastically increase CO2 in the atmosphere and probably kill off all large mammals. 500 million is when C3 photosynthesis stops being possible and virtually all plants are gone, which would collapse all terrestrial ecosystems and leave behind very little animal life, probably none. There seems to be a very high likelihood of extinction level asteroid strikes happening well before either of these.
But we're talking here about a span of time that is a thousand times longer than anatomically modern humans have existed up to this point. Given how far we've come since then, I don't know how you can possibly speculate what kinds of capabilities we might have by then to synthesize breathable air and food from raw disintegrated atoms of anything. If you look billions of years into the future, then it's going to get hot enough to sterilize the planet of any life whatsoever, which we probably can't overcome. If we can terraform other planets, we can terraform Earth itself, which would seemingly overcome any other challenge short of triple the heat that is eventually coming.
It seems maybe a bit premature to think this is something currently living humans should worry about figuring out how to escape from.
We might also note that, given the compartively short time it took humans to come about after the K-Pg event, it's probably reasonable to expect there is more than enough time before these "possibly all life killer" type far future things happen for some other kind of intelligent life that develops civilization and technology to replace humans if we go extinct by some means other than the planet being totally destroyed.
ok, so we have a loooottt of time to do that. for now, i think humanity already has waaaayyyy tooo many problems to deal with before we need to worry about that.
That's what dinosaurs thought and then the asteroid hit the Earth.
And, personally, I want a space telescope a thousand times bigger than James Webb. That's my biggest need after food, shelter, health and human connection.
But anyway; let's take it at the best case curiosity. I do like spaceflight. Is it a problem to you what people like? Does everything you like specifically address human needs? I find this confusing.
Regardless, all life on Earth is going to die. I see it as a "major human need" to avoid death of our civilization and all other life we know of in the whole universe, if it becomes possible. And it does seem more possible now - because of the advances SpaceX has made with hard rocket tech in the last few years, specifically.