while it might be possible for a space economy to exist I'm saying that humans will never stay in space for long periods of time - the space economy (except for

while it might be possible for a space economy to exist I'm saying that humans will never stay in space for long periods of time - the space economy (except for the satellites and stuff we have now), will basically revolve entirely around space tourism - so all those resources and manufacturing techniques will only be valuable insofar as they support space tourism (which will only be a fraction of the overall tourism industry, i think it would even be relatively niche). There's a lot of interesting stuff in space, for a physicist or astronomer - but they don't even need to go there themselves to learn about it. I don't think spacex's 25 billion valuation is ridiculous at all. but if it went public it would probably get ridiculous (this wouldn't necessarily be a horrible thing, there are far greater tragedies), based on people's misunderstanding of what is technically possible in the near or medium term future, in large part thanks to disproportionate screen time anthropocentric science fiction gets.