Keeping them there would likely have to be profitable, otherwise the considerable expense of putting them there would be very hard to justify. Some predictable

Keeping them there would likely have to be profitable, otherwise the considerable expense of putting them there would be very hard to justify. Some predictable and unpreventable existential crisis might do that, but I can think of few cases where setting up a dozen similarly sized self-sufficient colonies on the Earth (in Antarctica, buried in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert, etc.) wouldn't be a better strategy with higher chance of success.