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First Commercial Mission To the Moon Launched From China
mbone writes with news about the first privately-funded spacecraft to travel the Moon. Cold War competition between superpowers dominated the first decades of space travel and exploration. Individual governments took the lead, bankrolling most of the process in the name of competition and nationalism. Ultimately international cooperation and collaboration took root, and the landscape is already very different. The present and future of space exploration is more collaborative, more international, and involves both space agencies and private companies. One such project is the combination Chang’e 5-T1 and Manfred Memorial Moon Mission (4M), which launched together last Thursday. Both projects are testbeds for ideas: Chang’e 5-T1 is a prototype for a robotic probe intended to return samples from the Moon to Earth, while 4M is a simple communications experiment encouraging amateur participation. But the intriguing bit is that 4M is a project of the private Luxembourg-based company LuxSpace, while Chang’e 5-T1 is a Chinese project, and the whole endeavor was launched on a Chinese rocket.
You don't say overtly that it's a bad thing that the United States has socialistic constraints on its capitalistic economy... and it's not. Socialism - NOT Communism - done well is a far better economic system for advanced societies than capitalism. Better to call it mutualism or voluntary socialism. In the context of any advanced society pure capitalism can never be done well; it reaches a peak benefit - the United States has passed that point - and then begins to cause irreparable harm that leads to eventual economic and social collapse. It's a cyclic process that repeats as long as capitalism is the economic law of the jungle. We must evolve our species to more naturally cooperate rather than compete and combat.
I think you're quote correct that capitalism is not applicable to advanced society. And it's because a society with the modern level of complexity violates one of the fundamental precepts of capitalism: that individual actors are knowledgable about what they're in the market for.
It's difficult to speak of certain points (since the behavior of Society since the industrial revolution up to the present has been a highly dynamic, non-equilibrium process, unlike the feudal era preceeding it) but it is clear that once you reach early 20th century levels of technology, the variety of goods wanted and needed start to exceed the average person's ability to be informed. How can one speak of a market efficiently allocating resources, if people don't even know what resource requests to make?
Even in the Nordic countries with their generous welfare states, the great majority of people get up and go to work everyday. Even among the people who don't work and get some kind of public support, many are pursuing a degree, or in fact working some small job under the table. A lot of people would be bored without some routine, and most people want the nice amenities they could buy beyond what a basic income scheme would provide.
In any event, as we move towards increasing automation, at some point we will have to stop thinking it a bad thing when a person chooses not to work, if the only jobs he/she could do would be artificial makework. In the past, retraining redundant workers allowed them to stay productive, but now so much of what people were retrained to do is being automated away. While the new "creative economy" or "internet economy" has offered some new markets, the world only needs so many Perez Hiltons, for example, and it would be unreasonable to expect the masses of unemployed workers around the world to become professional bloggers just for the sake of "not being unemployed".
Let's face it, without some competition, the USA would sit around with its thumb up its ass.
Well, what could we expect, when the space programmes of the US and USSR were, in large parts, no more than dick-waving? The Chinese are quite naturally milking their space program for its publicity value, but they have their eyes firmly on the commercial and political power objectives in the long term. I wish them all success with it - it can only benefit us all, if space exploration becomes sustainable or viable or whatever the word is. And hopefully this will spur the West and Russia on to try to do better.