The wealthy have always been privileged to look past the mundane.
Or at least those not driven by meeting mundane needs.
Innovation happens in two ways. The first and short-termiest is applying current knowledge to what's needed to help meet daily needs. We're good at that. Produce a better mousetrap and make a lot of $. But it went on before that, too. Monks were great drivers of innovations because they both had time to sit back and think and learn (founding universities and schools) and went out to earn their own bread and help those around them. A lot of Islamic innovations made their way to Europe and only *then* got applied in real life and made widespread, but the monks also applied a lot of older knowledge (or re-invented the wheel, so to speak, in some cases).
The second kind of innovation is far, far more important. Applying what we know helps people now, directly. But figuring out what we don't know increases the body of knowledge that others can apply, and often finds immediate application as well. For that you need people who *aren't* worried about where their next day's food is coming from or about where their kids will be sleeping next week. You need people who can provide funding to others to do nothing but observe, record, and think for years at a time. Kopernik, Newton come to mind. Or you need people who are intelligent and in a place where they can work: Maxwell, for instance, or Lord Kelvin, Lavoisier or even underworked Einstein in his patent office and later "producing nothing" in Princeton.
Some such wealthy folk fund musicians or artists; others fund scientists. Much of "Islamic learning" were rulers sitting on a lot of war booty and money harvested from farmers and workers who had holdings confiscated from libraries from N. Africa into N. India and who could afford to employ people as kept scholars. Now they fund endowed chairs. Sadly, most individual donors fund social-change "let's re-educate the masses" sort of chairs while it's corporations and government who are more likely to fund basic research into stuff that'll make people's lives better instead of forcing others to behave. Even then, basic research funding is down, and government-funded research tends to be very politicized. It's no different than a khalif or a robber-baron or the Kochs making sure that their money funds the research they want, but that's a level of generalization most don't want to get to: We get outraged over the latter, but government's politicizing its funding (and controlling what's done with others' funding) is just fine. It's all a matter over who's dictating, and *we* are never dictators. Just wiser and more intelligent.
Think of space exploration as straddling these two kinds of innovation, though. To some extent, they have very specific goals in mind: mine an asteroid, for instance, to get all that cobalt necessary for Teslas without engaging in blood minerals or supporting warlord thugs. In other cases, they have loftier, grander designs. Keep in mind that if a rich person gets to Mars, there'll be no coming back and unless there's support staff and enough population to make a go of it, there's no staying there, either.