Space research is great, but first things first, surely. Unlimited research requires unlimited funding, which requires unlimited energy.
We have that with the sun, but it needs to be enabled by the appropriate human ecosystem, like issue of money enumerating Joules received from the sun, put use by humanity already, and for the future.
It is nowhere near as exciting or glamorous working on development of this, as working on space developments, but once it is done, all barriers to space exploration are removed. Even better we would no longer be driven to do it as an extension of colonialism, we would be doing it for curiosity alone.
The danger as things are, seems to be that we are too busy focusing on next steps, not realising we are already tripping on the first step, with the ground rapidly approaching.