I wonder if space exploration will turn out to be no different than mountain climbing. There's nothing useful on the mountain, we can't live there, it's purely exploration, sport, and a feeling of achievement.
By far the most motivating part of high dangerous mountains is the internal journey of climbers to have confidence in your own skills and training to overcome any obstacle that can happen. Then facing an unpredictable challenges, trusting your teammates if you are not solo, overcome them or knowing when to retreat to safety.
Facing semi-continuous fear of death, not getting hampered it but calmly assessing it and acting accordingly is a great skill for any aspect of life. Overcoming oneself mentally, pushing and redefining our own limits (normal folks have them mentally set very low compared to actual threshold) is the gist of it.
All this and much more while being mentally degraded to 10-20% of capacity at sea level. in environment where 1 mistake can be easily the last one. Physical capacity is also greatly reduced, and you climb very steeply or almost vertically, with 10-20kg backpack, sometimes more. Doing this even for weeks without break. Summit push can be easily 48-72h 100% effort without a sip of water, any food nor sleep, after all I've written. I wouldn't even call this 'sport', you don't call early Antarctic expeditions a sport, do you.
I don't see why almost all of this and much more shouldn't be present in space exploration, just environment will be a bit different (but views on myriads of stars remain).
