My country has great healthcare, great education, we all speak multiple languages. What are we known for, worldwide? Banks and chocolate. The only Swiss astronaut so far had practically to get into NASA on his own. Try pitching any advanced tech project here that isn't pharma-related and you'll get rebuffed with a polite chuckle. If that's the wonderful future you long for, you can have it.
And my country put a man on the moon and won two world wars (even dropped an a-bomb for the first time in the history of warfare), but we are largely known as ignorant and obese. Personally, I'd rather have people know me for banks and sweets, then for being dumb and fat (oddly enough, these two traits are quite similar anymore).
And again - NOBODY gets into science without the perspective of gain unless he's a saint or a visionary. Science takes a lot of time and effort to learn, and you cannot easily retrain a physicist into something else. You will end up spending money to train scientists who will then emigrate somewhere else, or adapt to menial jobs to survive (because they'll be "overqualified" for anything in between).
Nowhere did I say the scientists cannot be rewarded by the fruits of their research, nor did I say that I want to train everyone to become a scientist. I want to incentive science and research, and am okay with making it a hard community to enter because it eventually weeds out many of the people who are not capable of doing good science. I know that when I finally get my PhD, I hope to feel like my investment in my education was worth something tangible.
Because a lot of this countries scientific community are public-institution academics (or private-institution academics who receive public grants) we are protected against limited scope research. If I go tomorrow and talk with a P/I, we could draw up a study, and if we've designed a good or intriguing research question we can get funds to go and do the study while taking all of the credit (which in academia means money) that the study yielded (eventually delivering the result of the research in to the public domain).
I honestly don't see a shortage of research questions or good scientists unable to find prestigious enough work to create wealth. I do see a shortage of billions of dollars to go do that work that we spend on trying to do something that IMO makes no logical sense. The two questions that need to be answered are where would we go/how do we get there and then what would we do when we got there. We can still develop technology to put machines in space- technology that could lead us to answer both of those questions, but currently I'm not convinced of the benefits of people in space.