Let's do it without government

"Mining the Sky" by John S. Lewis is a great read. He points out that "the last three Saturn 5 boosters,  already built and paid for, were laid out as lawn ornaments at Cape Canaveral, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Johnson Space Center, to rust into ruin and serve as a testimony to the futility of that dream. Only governments can afford to spend a quarter of a billion dollars each for the equivalent of plastic flamingos." Then he describes the fate of the tools and dies, sold pennies on the dollar (a 20 billion dollar investment) and melted down for scrap. The plans donated to a Boy Scout paper drive. And the last of plans in the Federal Records Archives in Atlanta are "lost". So much for GOVERNMENT intelligence. The whole space effort was a geopolitical stunt based on lies. Evidently President Eisenhower financed U2 effort to find out if Russia had ICBM's. They found out they had FOUR.  JFK got elected on the fear of a  "missile gap" that did not exist. JFK knew that.  Lack of intelligence, foresight, imagination, or even "hindsight" for that matter. Lack of accountability to the public. Central planning sucks. Government is untrustworthy.

Capitalism can achieve Space development for us. Paradoxically Hong Kong is the only place on Earth right now that has been left untouched by government regulation. China doesn't mess with it because it WORKS and pays them dividends. You can get a business "license" with ONE form filed. It has the number one economy and the most freedom. We are a mixed socialism/capitalism economy and number 9 on the list of economies. Pure socialist countries rank at the bottom of the list in the 170's.  That should be informative to China, USA, and the rest of the world, but somehow escapes notice of supposedly intelligent people. We have a long way to go.

So many problems. We need real solutions. Governments will not do that for us. Abundance of resources and energy await us in space. We will only mature as a species when we are able to open up this frontier. We need to get to work on it NOW without government.