Christopher Columbus spent years trying to find sponsors to invest in a risky and very expensive endeavor.

He failed to entice King John II of Portugal to sponsor the journey.

Two years later, in 1486, he got an audience with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.

They referred him to a committee.

Six years later, the journey was approved, despite the misgivings of a lot of experts who were sure that Asia was a lot farther than Columbus insisted.

They were right, and he was wrong, technically.

But Columbus’ willingness to take the risk to seek out that new trade route ended up leading to one of the most important discoveries in history.

Decades later, Ferdinand Magellan set out to find land and treasure while attempting something no one had done before.

The journey sadly ended for him in the Philippines, but the expedition went on.

In the end, a single ship out of the five that originally left arrived back in a Spanish harbor, having succeeded in circumnavigating the globe.

Over the next few hundred years, fleets of vessels charged into the brutally cold Northern Atlantic, trying to find open water that would significantly shorten trips from Europe to Asia.

Many men died, and there was no guaranteed return on investment.

But those trips resulted in the mapping of the Arctic landmasses.

Nowadays, we seem to have an impulse to demand that all exploration justify itself to an extraordinary degree.

If there is too much uncertainty, the project should be abandoned.

This is especially the case for anything government-funded.

I’ve seen this manifest a lot lately in the comment sections under nearly every video of a SpaceX launch.

Comments like, “Why are we wasting money on this when we’ve got problems to solve here? and all I see are my tax dollars being burned as rocket fuel, and this money could go to the poor.” It’s a logical impulse, and in some cases comes from a solid fiscal conservative mind, or from a sensitivity to waste when individuals are struggling to make ends meet.

They are not wrong that our government spends money like a kid on Roblox with mom’s credit card.

Government waste is very real, ubiquitous,....