Thus The Guardian today. “After extreme cuts at NASA, a loose agglomeration of private companies—like Elon Musk’s SpaceX—have revived the dormant dream of colonizing other worlds,” elaborates the newspaper. The article comes with many a wonderful picture. But much of it is about the new hopes raised by the private sector alone. This is inspiring, no doubt, but there is little, if any, hard-nosed economics to the argument. To wit, the infrastructure needed for a space program worthy of that name would require tremendous resources, which could be provided only by the public sector. That infrastructure would stretch via the moon and Mars all the way to the asteroid belt in the inner solar system, which means that all the countries in the world would need to shoulder a hefty share of the costs. Only then could the private sector take off. This interplay between the two sectors would be essential for space colonization, which is the sole long-term hope for the human species. Otherwise, we will have nothing but wonderful pictures galore.