I'd certainly agree in a way. Consumerism along with the backing of private telecoms is one of the big reasons private companies like SpaceX can even exist. And

I'd certainly agree in a way. Consumerism along with the backing of private telecoms is one of the big reasons private companies like SpaceX can even exist. And I do expect that the first rocket to land people on another planet will not come from a government, but a private company. Such a comment would have seemed quite sci-fi in the 60s when there was no private space industry to speak of. But at the same time, these are tangential achievements. Miniaturization and greater processing speed will certainly be nice tools. But the things that are really needed are effectively 0 fail rate self sustaining habitation, life support, energy production, and food production in extremely hostile conditions. We still have not entirely solved these and they are things we could have been working on decades ago, but as human space flight died so did their necessity.