How to succeed or fail on a frontier (2006)

This guy's metaphor completely and totally breaks down when he begins comparing today's space agencies to China and Portugal of the 15th century.

Apollo and the shuttle weren't caravels and galleons. To extend the aquatic metaphor here, Apollo was our most sophisticated floating log at the time, and the Shuttle was our first real attempt at tying some logs together so we could ferry supplies back and forth to a little sandbar (the ISS) we created 15 feet off shore. If we ever try for Mars, we'll probably be sending our first dug-out canoe.

China and Portugal knew how to create decent and practical sailing ships. We barely know how to get into space, much less have anywhere near the technology available to exploit it properly.

And most importantly: THERE IS NO ONE AND NOTHING OUT THERE TO TRADE WITH. No developed resources and easily-available goods we can just pluck out of the metaphoric ground and take back. Everything up there has to go through a very complicated and expensive process of development before it becomes useful and profitable.

The better metaphor for the current state of space development may be if Portugal was the only human settlement in all the world, and its only watercraft were floating logs. The China vs Portugal argument might work in two hundred or more years, when we actually have the space-going equivalent of caravels and galleons, but for right now just finding a decent oar we can paddle with is quite an accomplishment.

Broader metaphor aside, the size of Zheng He's ships is heavily debated. There's very little historical evidence for their size, and the larger estimates are considered unrealistic by most.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He#Size_of_the_ships

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship

It is fantastic that space is becoming profitable and I very much hope Spacex and the like grow exponentially.

But it's hard to imagine space technology would advance faster if NASA and JPL suddenly ceased to exist. It's even harder to imagine space tech would be anywhere near as far along as it is now if they had never existed in the first place. Besides that, the Apollo program supported almost the entire semiconductor and even transistor industry for a decade. Our world today would be unrecognizably more primitive with out that.

And while "useful" military applications gave us the V2, and then the space race to build suborbital missiles capable of carrying nuclear payloads, the "socialist" non military NASA projects involve less city destruction or risk of nuclear annihilation. A future orbital arms race will presumably move some land based missiles into orbit and cut down crucial retaliation decision time to seconds. "Useful" though it may be, military expansion would be the kind of development best avoided

So China did not fall behind because of Zheng He, it fell behind _inspite_ of him. It fell behind because an overly restrictive, incurious, overly frugal leadership prematurely _stopped_ exploration, both government and private. A similar thing happen to Japan without ever having a costly initial government expedition.

Conversely, Norse exploration failed even though it which was low cost, benefit driven and not central subsidized. Overall, Europe was lucky in that it was so balkanized that a few countries were bound to send/allow ships into the unknown. "Lucky" also was that a gold filled North American blocked Columbus on what would have been a suicide trip across Pacific + Atlantic. Which trip, incidentally, was government funded.