Perhaps but you don't judge space travel by the half a trillion dollars it cost us to put boots on the Moon. It gets cheaper as we do it and this was my whole p

Perhaps but you don't judge space travel by the half a trillion dollars it cost us to put boots on the Moon. It gets cheaper as we do it and this was my whole point. In the long run we will probably have to develop such tech anyway if we want to go anywhere beyond Mars so it would be a worthwhile investment. It would pay off by letting us explore every place that humans can't feasibly reach but hold a lot of promise for exploration. Like Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, maybe even Venus. It would probably also pay off here at home, there are plenty of applications for such tech (hopefully to improve life rather than as a military tool). Anyway either option has no real impact on the development of rocketry tech. Whatever we choose it still has to get there somehow.