[jodrellblank]

There was a time (1930 - 1960) when Futurism believed we could do great things. Now I imagine a Moonbase or Mars base, and then it gets bought by Private Equity who cancel the maintenance budget, double the number of tourists, and when it OceanGate Titans with the loss of everyone, they shrug and the courts don't give them so much as a slap on the wrist.

That would never happen to the Starship Enterprise. Even in Total Recall, where the baddies wanted to kill the poor, they cared about the integrity of the base keeping everyone alive.

[bell-cot]

Maybe I'm not reading the right techno-utopian stuff - but I've never seen a Moon Base or Mars Base proposal which claimed to both have an actual business plan, and to project sustained profits.*

Having no prospect for sustained profits is pretty good for keep PE away.

(OceanGate Titan was a money-losing obsession project, not a viable business.)

*Except maybe the O'Neill Space Colony idea - where the Moon Base is just a Lunar strip mine, plus mass driver to throw the "ore" into orbit. IIR, they used a load of NASA's 1970's "lies we must tell Congress" numbers in calculating their transportation costs. And their whole scenario is about half a century out of date now.