...and Spain should have never fronted the money for Columbus to explore either...
Spain made great riches off of the deal. We landed on the moon and decided not to claim it. Big difference.
Ferdinand and Isabella didn't front Columbus several billion dollars to circle around in the water in sight of Cadiz doing osteoporosis experiments.
Columbus is a miserable example to use when you want to make the case for "exploration" for the sake of itself. Sure, his intentions were probably noble and he may have been a good, decent man -- and he actually found something here in the New World after all. The problem, though, is that he was incompetent in some key ways and was (deservedly) scorned when he set out on his adventure.
Somebody made the point that Tyco's observatory, Uraniborg, on the island of Hven consumed proportionately as much of the Danish gross national product as the Apollo program.
By fortuitous good luck, the young king who successed Tycho's patron cut off his stipend and more or less drove Tycho from Denmark. Tycho wound up at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, were he met up with Kepler. Kelpler may have been one of the few men in Europe, and by that standard the World, in a position to benefit from the treasure that was in Tycho's 20+ years of observation.
Kelper, in pursuit of a crackpot pet theory, tried to fit Tycho's observation to a Copernican model. When this failed, he hit upon his now famous ellipses.
(Owen Gingrich reports that a German mathematician named Wittich had made a margin note in Greek in his copy of Copernicus, "Ellipsis" - Copernican epicycles approximate ellipses. Kepler may have seen this copy. There is evidenct that Wittich may also have invented logarithms to simplify the calculation of Ptolemic and later Copernican ephemerides. Napier studied with him. But Wittich never seemed able to publish the ideas of his fertile brain.)
Kepler's ellipses, and Galilleo's mechanics were channeled by an child born in an obscure corner of England and came to revolutionize science and technology.
Did Tycho's patron get his moneys' worth?
Half the Pilgrims died in the first winter in Plymouth.
Well, at least when Columbus sailed he eventually *bumped into land* which is more than can be said of the shuttles that on every flight just wind up going around in circles.
Oh yes, they have made a significant discovery. It is said that on one of the flights they established the fact that it is possible to have sex in zero gravity which is something every pothead already knew, that you can *get it on* when you're high and floatin'.