
How to succeed or fail on a frontier (2006) - silt
https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed-or-fail-on-frontier.html
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IlegCowcat
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.

~~~
penetrator
"Each expedition pushing farther south was a humble affair involving tiny
numbers of small ships."

small, iterative steps

"Soon after the middle of the century, the Portuguese learned by repeated
experience how to navigate out of sight of the (northern) Pole Star."

learn something new and integrate

the benefit of expedition was not only about trade, they also learned how to
navigate

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9nGQluzmnq3M
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/Zheng_He#Size_of_the_ships)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship)

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TomMckenny
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.

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

Where to start with this ...

SpaceX has no future, since there aren't enough satellite launch customers to
justify 5,000 full-time staff to run it.

Hence their pollution of LEO with thousands of microsatellites.

The worst thing SpaceX ever did from a business standpoint was reusable
rockets. When you have limited customers, you need to maximize revenue.

And the sooner that piece of junk ISS is de-orbited, the better. Of course,
not much reason for SpaceX to continue staggering along after that.

