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

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.