perfidy

Actually, exploration required significant amounts of capitol from both private interests and governments--these worked hand in hand. At the very least, private investors relied on governments to maintain navies and to assert claims around the world for its citizens. The Dutch East and West Indian companies were semi-public organizations: they were public in the sense that they were open to investment. And Dutch officials were at the head of efforts to maintain Dutch colonies when they were challenged by the English. Columbus: state financed. Drake: state financed. Lewis and Clark: state financed. Such was certainly the case with Germany, who colonial enterprises were nil until Germany developed a navy that could (1) transport troops around the world and (2) challenge the British Navy, and by extension, British presence. British polar expeditions were financed by academic institutions that were heavily patroned by the crown.

I would have named the system The Rutan Flyer. Or name the drop ship named Orville and the space ship Wilbur.

Either way, a sort of belated tribute to the Wright brothers' centennial would have been appropriate.

Ok, ok, ok. Thanks for the clarification, NDR. I didn't see the forest for the trees.

Sidebar: When was the first time that the very rich were not almost automatically a part of a state's leadership? When did that happen?

Johno - pretty much in the last couple centuries, first here and in Britain.

A lot of the major innovations in technology and commerce over the last couple centuries have come completely out of left field, at least as far as the government was concerned. Railroads (admittedly, they had government support - but still largely private), Airplanes in particular and aviation in general, personal computers, and a thousand others. Strangely, the internet was a product of cold war paranoia. No better proof of the law of unintended circumstances could you find.

NDR - you are perhaps overlooking a distinction between exploration and development efforts. There is a consistent pattern that exploration efforts have been funded by state entities. These are the leaps into the unknown like Columbus, Magellan, Drake, Lewis and Clark, Gagarin, and Armstrong and Aldrin.

The efforts of the Dutch East Indies Company, the British Hudson Bay Company and East India Company were colonizing and development efforts. They were not nearly so blue sky as pure exploration. Here investors were putting their money behind comapnies that had an idea of what was there, how to get there, and what to do once there.

To be sure, there was a heavy government involvement in some of these efforts. But some level of independence was always there too. And as time went by, more and more development effort was conducted outside government purvue, and outside of monopolistic trading concerns chartered by the government. Like, say, the American West.

This effort - by a fantastically wealthy private individual, a brilliant designer and a very lucky pilot - is something right out of a Victorian era romance. But it is nevertheless a development effort. The gubmint proved that space travel could be done forty years ago. This is (the beginning of, hopefully) commercialization and colonization.

(it would be interesting to look at the difference in methods between Spanish and Portuguese colonization efforts - wholly state controlled - and the British and Dutch efforts that you mentioned. I think a lot of the differences we see now might be a result of the commercial culture that existed in England and the Netherlands (and really, only there at the time) that led them to cast their colonization efforts as companies, charters, etc.)

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