AviraDeArah,
“To put ourselves in situations where the best we can do is posit ad-hoc theories about what the halacha “might” be, is to push avodas Hashem on the back burner and put our own interests first. This is what “I” want to do, now let’s see how we can fit halacha into it… that’s not an eved to a master, it’s a person who is living for themselves and trying to assuage his guilty conscience.”
Why such hostility and assuming the worst of intentions? Going into space is likely assur for a much more simple reason: pikuach nefesh. Rockets are dangerous, as is outer space. Very few people go into space at all right now, and those who do go at most stay in a low Earth orbit. Most space tourism right now doesn’t even achieve orbit, so the whole trip takes less than an hour from launch to landing (you get to see the blackness of space and the curvature of the Earth for a few minutes, and experience weightlessness as the capsule free-falls back towards Earth).
If rocket or novel transportation technologies become safer and cheaper, more advanced space tourism, e.g., orbiting hotels, lunar resorts, may become feasible. Large-scale lunar or Martian colonization is further off, as there is mounting evidence that the challenges are greater than previously believed, due to harmful effects of long stays in space, radiation exposure due to weak magnetic fields on the moon or Mars, solar flares, etc. It’s also possible that mining asteroids for raw materials could become big business, though I imagine that much of that work would be done by robots. So maybe in our lifetimes we’d see shailos come up about whether a 2 week vacation to the Moon is appropriate, or if a frum business man needs to take a trip to a space station overseeing a mining operation, but who knows? Nobody is trying to skirt mitzvos by taking a hyperwarp cruiser to planet Xorkon 7. It’s purely science fiction and a theoretical exercise. And the latest astronomy research has been suggesting that Earth-like potentially habitable planets are much more rare than previously thought, as the most common star type (red dwarf) likely emits atmosphere-stripping amounts of solar wind. Not that we even have the capability of interstellar travel.