A practical issue with government spending is that it's self motivated. Politicians' only job is to get elected. And one big way to do that is by ensuring that money goes to your district, creating jobs and opportunities. This is how you get things like the SLS, nicknamed the Senate Launch System. It was a tremendous waste of money, spending on the order of decades to build a launch system that was arguably obsoleted years before it completed, and will in any case be far too expensive to ever regularly use.
But the reason we kept throwing good money after bad is because the goal was never really about making a good launch system. It was all about sending money and creating stable long-term jobs in various states and districts, actively supported by the politicians representing those areas. So you had parts being built all over the place, in a way that just sends costs skyrocketing, but that's okay - because the rocket isn't the goal.
Of course the government itself is aware of this problem, much like fishermen are aware that overfishing is self destructive in the long-run, even if they are nonetheless individually motivated to do exactly that. So I think this was why the big push for commercializing space. And I think we'll ultimately see the exact same thing with deeper space missions and technologies. SpaceX's goal is Mars and I see no reason to think they will fail there. At that point, costs for various Martian missions - be they sample return, rovers, or whatever else - should be relatively negligible relative to today. Exactly as happened when we went from ferrying people to the ISS using the Space Shuttle, to when we started launching them on Falcon rockets.
Cynicism is a variety of compliance in advance. It creates the conditions it decries.
Obviously there are corrupt politicians. But also obviously there are politicians who actually want to advance the public interest. It is the job of voters to tell them apart and ensure only the latter become the custodians of state power.
Politics, especially in its modern form, does not incentivize nor reward those who would put the public interest ahead of their own political careers. On the contrary it effectively prunes the overwhelming majority of these people out of office long before they get anywhere near the higher levels of office.
There have certainly been a few exceptions, but they're few and far between - and tend to be because of special circumstance. For instance I think Bernie Sanders, before he tried to run for President, was a good guy. But that's because he's from Vermont, a state with a smaller population than El Paso, TX. Democracy works quite well with small populations, but not so well with with larger populations when the 'distance', speaking both metaphorically and literally, between voters and their representatives grows too far. It also tends to fail when societies become too divided.
As for the voter determining who's socially motivated and who's a silver tongued conman? I don't think that's at all realistic.
But the reason we kept throwing good money after bad is because the goal was never really about making a good launch system. It was all about sending money and creating stable long-term jobs in various states and districts, actively supported by the politicians representing those areas. So you had parts being built all over the place, in a way that just sends costs skyrocketing, but that's okay - because the rocket isn't the goal.
Of course the government itself is aware of this problem, much like fishermen are aware that overfishing is self destructive in the long-run, even if they are nonetheless individually motivated to do exactly that. So I think this was why the big push for commercializing space. And I think we'll ultimately see the exact same thing with deeper space missions and technologies. SpaceX's goal is Mars and I see no reason to think they will fail there. At that point, costs for various Martian missions - be they sample return, rovers, or whatever else - should be relatively negligible relative to today. Exactly as happened when we went from ferrying people to the ISS using the Space Shuttle, to when we started launching them on Falcon rockets.