I've thought for a long time that Apollo and the Zheng He expeditions were similar, and not in a good way.
Apollo and the Zheng He expeditions were both spectacular dead ends. "It is by practical efforts ... not by glorious bureaucratic white elephants, that the successful pioneers will, in good time, explore and develop the solar system."
https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-succeed-or-fail-on-frontier.html …
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Neither was actual exploration; both were done mostly for prestige
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Neither made any money.
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The Zheng He mission both distributed gifts and collected tribute -- I'm not sure which was more, and I suspect the net even if positive fell far short of recouping the extraordinary costs. Timber on the Chinese coast was scarce.
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No. But it should be done at a far more economical scale and cost than astronaut projects to date (if this means just robots, so be it), and without the economic fantasies that followed in the wake of Apollo and still distort space development.
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Zheng He didn’t go anywhere new, and the Chinese later burned his ships and destroyed records of his trips. Not the analogy I would have used.
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Space isn't happening until we find something worth the trip.
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I think a lot of the reason: when you insist on building a vehicle that size you work yourself into a corner where everything is expensive and you can't experiment to make a substantially better engine.
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SpaceX built a business and a revolution in space launch around evolving the cancelled FASTRAC engine from the cancelled X-34 project back in the 90's.
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a lot of basic boring science was advanced by the space program. the kind of research that private industry wont see the benefits of for decades.
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Like what?
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