I feel that each human nation as soon as they becomes a supper power they adopt behavior of a bully having bullies sense of justice e.g. "domination, violence and exploit".
Comparing a good technological achievement with moral and ethical values is not good analogy, but I understand what was your attempt. Speaking about the open space, i think that bully mindset is not really a behavior we want to carry with us. Do we really think that if other intelligent life (if it exist of course and is more intelligent) will let us?
Another issue is that space gives a military upper hand, meaning who ever deploys Moon base or Mars base will have ability to produce nukes or commence meteor strike on opponent country without much chance to defend themselves. So, in some sense something noble can be easily tuned to eval means. If China builds a moon base on the far side, we need to pair with moon base and spying satellites so we can track what are they doing, crating new military race, all the while mother planet is burning because of Global Warming as trillions are diverted - due to inability of nations to cooperate with each other.
Thus, I am trying to say, more technological power requires higher level of consciousness (goodness), otherwise we are just raging monkeys that will blow them selves up in one way or another.