Doubling down on this comment, you said it perfectly!

1) You don’t meet a lot of people who hate space travel. You just meet a lot of people who have the opinion of “We went to the moon decades ago and have done nothing since. Re-using rockets is a neat, but we’ve done plenty of neat things that never reach their endgame goal”. Our private space race has made great leaps and bounds that are appreciated by science die-hards, but the general public probably won’t get excited until we actually accomplish the endgames that these achievements lead up to.

2) Space travel needs money. Money comes from a robust economy. Generally speaking, as humans expand their reaches, their economy grows. Maybe our Mars base can export asteroid minerals? Space tourism? Who knows?! I know I don’t, I’m just a science fan with very little education on space. But as we expand, the amount of money these space companies will have to work with could grow exponentially. My uneducated guess is that the time between man on moon -> man on mars is at least twice as long as man on mars -> man on (next celestial body).