The creative potential, sadly much neglected today. The potential to freely explore interesting new ways to make and build in a very different environment.

The space agencies and the Willy Wonka oligarchs look to space mostly for prestige and glory. The racket of state and corporate spectacle with some Big Science thrown in so it doesn't seem like a complete waste of time that, in the end, never actually delivers on its perpetual promise of opening space to society.

Space enthusiasts tend to be motivated by a somewhat erroneous sense of adventure and thrills, as so long promised by science fiction. Remote sensing has given us a good picture of what's on offer in our immediate cosmic neighborhood and it's all pretty-much Iceland or Greenland with less air --beautiful in its primeval ruggedness, but there ain't much going on over a Saturday night. There is much to learn and discover, but we're probably not stumbling onto the world of Avatar in an overlooked crater somewhere. Alas, we will have to wait for the means to reach other stars for any prospect of that --SciFi moved on long ago. In truth, it's mostly the sorts of things that excite the likes of geologists. Important, sure, but they generally don't need humans around to do. Nothing in space really does, in an era of robotics and AI. Suited astronauts can't actually do a hell of a lot. So all they really add is cost and risk, usually for the sake of that spectacle. It doesn't matter how cheap the seats on the rocket if all you can do on arrival is stare out a porthole. Without a practical means to make and build in the space environment, it might as well be the submarine ride at Disneyland.

And then there are those motivated by weltschmerz. World-weariness. The compulsion to get away from the noise, hassle, and oppression of a far-too-big society on an ever-shrinking world to a place where everything isn't owned by someone else with a compulsion to lord it over the rest of us. As Robert Zubrin once famously and half-jokingly said; we go to Mars because that's now how far you have to go to get away from the cops. Bruce Sterling suggested this would be the primary motivation of space colonization, and I tend to agree. Richard Proenneke was more space colonist material than Elon Musk will ever be.

But I see space as the ultimate form of Minecraft. A vast neglected backyard waiting to be made into something interesting, like a garden. We tend to think of space in a context of what we can take away from it. I'm more interested in what we might make out of it. To be a playfully artistic demiurge wandering the cosmos, bringing it to life.