Very few people truly understand the staggering energy expenditures necessary to inch up the gravity well. Very few people have been to a launch.

I watch them out at Vandenberg whenever I can. It's pretty humbling to watch a skyscraper full of hydrogen turn into a column of fire just to launch a Volkswagen into polar orbit. It's even more humbling when you realize it cost $6 billion to launch and mostly happened to spy on bin Laden.

And yeah, sure. There are more efficient ways to get stuff into space, all we need is some Buck Rogers. But the energy costs don't change, so now you need to muster up the equivalent of a skyscraper full of hydrogen to get that Volkswagen into polar orbit. And the Volkswagen is kind of the bare minimum to keep someone alive inside while you do it - a Mercury capsule is 4,000 lb of dumb, ballistic padding. Dragon X comes in at 9300lb and will just about get 7 people to the ISS, a bare 200 mi above the Karman line. The Falcon Heavy, should SpaceX ever build it, will get about 1/10th as much payload to the moon as the Saturn V did.

I dig space. I dig space exploration. But I agree with you 100% - arguing for Venus for "pragmatic" reasons is like arguing against vaccination because "science."