Funding is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for research to take place. It's only the first step.

Having a good supervisor is extremely important. The arrangement where your supervisor is a person who is knowledgable, up-to-date, and respected in their field, and draws on his years of experience to guide your through work and train you as a scientist, is the ideal on which the supervisor-student relationship is based on. A person like that more than deserves to have their name on the work you do while under their tutelage.

But going by what I've seen, such a relationship is, sadly, rare. A lot of students are victims of supervisors who either "don't care" or have been effectively outside their field of study for so long (with all the grant-writing) that they have simply no clue about research anymore. Your first experience seems to be the norm.

Because it's almost literally impossible for someone to actually put in all of the work required to publish hundreds of papers during their career. A paper might typically take six months of gruelling, full-time work. Instead of actually doing the work, what a lot of scientists do is they bring in a lot of students and act as project supervisors, as it says in the article: "Many of these prolific scientists are likely the heads of laboratories or research groups; they bring in funding, supervise research, and add their names to the numerous papers that result." In other words, they drop in for maybe half an hour every two weeks or so to get an 'update' (without really understanding anything), throw around some bs pieces of 'advice' (which everyone ignores) and then leave.

You bootstrap it by not trying to transfer all of this to space at once. Start with just a simple plan that takes small asteroids and brings them (or chunks of them) over to Earth orbit for processing. Stuff that's hard to build (like computers) are usually lightweight. Send them up from Earth in bulk.

But all of this is beside the point. That asteroid mining is difficult I completely concede. But how would sticking humans into the equations fix anything at all? Any gain in repair ability would be at the expense of a huge amount of additional complexity and risk in keeping the humans alive and functioning.

It's worth pointing out that all existing practical proposals for Mars colonization that I've seen involve sending hard-to-manufacture supplies (basically anything other than structural materials) to the colonies for at least a century afterwards. If that's what you're going to do then why not just cut humans out of the equation.

You hit the nail on the head. The problem isn't AI. The problem is that scaling it up to industrial levels is hard. And the absolute WORST way of solving that problem is making manned mining ships, raising the complexity, cost, and risk by 100x.

Why does it have to? Build them out of cheap, expendable, easily-replaceable parts. Which you can do, because the entire premise of asteroid mining is that it will make the cost of building and deploying space equipment dead cheap (otherwise why do it in the first place?)

Sure, but the problem is that once the coolness factor wears off, they stop doing it. It's not sustainable.

We don't? We already have AI that can autonomously land on other bodies and extract material. In fact we've had it for 4 decades. See: almost any planetary lander/rover ever. It seems the barrier to mining is more up-front cost and on-site materials processing than AI.

I'm a techno-optimist but I agree with you. The rate things are going, it isn't going to make much sense to have people living in space colonies. I can't think of any good reason to do it other than the coolness factor. Unfortunately a lot of people are emotionally invested in this idea and will fight logic tooth and nail to promote their fantasies.