In the first third of the 15th century, while the Hundred Years War between England and France stormed dramatically to its denouement (Agincourt, Joan of Arc), and Muslims held on by their fingernails to their last fragment of Spain, and the Ottomans regrouped following the ravages of Tamurlane, and Ladislas II was breaking the power of the Teutonic Knights — while all that was happening at the other end of the Eurasian land-mass, China was enjoying a spell of national confidence and bold self-assertion under the third Ming emperor.
The famous great tourist sites of Peking stand as testimony to that period of vigor. Among its other glories, though they left us with no monuments to admire other than a few scattered steles, were the seagoing expeditions of Zheng He. In seven voyages from 1405 to 1433, Zheng and his “treasure fleets” carried the imperial banner to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and the east coast of Africa.
The striking thing is how utterly little historical consequence these voyages had. It can fairly be argued, in fact, that they had none at all. A school of revisionist historians has come up arguing that Zheng was instrumental in the consolidation of Islam in Indonesia; and one scholar even tells us that “Zheng He reshaped Asia.” Even on the most extravagant claims, though, nobody thinks that Zheng’s voyages had any result as dramatic as what followed the great European explorations of a few decades later.
There were no colonies established as a result of the treasure fleets, no trade routes opened up, no alliances formed, no enlargements of understanding among China’s educated classes. The Ming court decided, at last, that the whole business was too costly. The records of Zheng’s last two expeditions were destroyed in a court intrigue, and China commenced the retreat into incurious bureaucratic despotism from which she was awoken only 400 years later, when European traders came banging on the nation’s doors.
Now, as we approach the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing (July 20), you have to wonder if history is repeating itself. America’s manned space program was a grandiose public-works project, government-initiated and government-funded, like Zheng’s expeditions. Its achievements, like theirs, were sensational but content-free. Men floated in orbit above the earth’s atmosphere, men
walked on the Moon, but nothing changed among the earthbound.
There were no permanent consequences, and no jolt to the imagination such as the opening of the New World delivered to Europe. Once the Moon had been attained, nobody could think of any satisfactory follow-up. Mars was 100 times farther away, and promised essentially the same scenery, only under a different-colored sky. Why bother? With the Cold War still going on, and patriotism still widespread even among the educated classes, there was a general feeling that
some kind of manned space effort ought to continue, and so
the Space Shuttle was conceived.
There is work we need to do in orbit! our politicians told us.
This is the vehicle that will do it! What was that work? Today, after
126 shuttle flights across 28 years and an expenditure of several hundred billion dollars, not one American in ten could give you an answer, and the occasional exception would be unable to explain why the work might not have been done as well by robots at one-tenth the cost. Probably most people who had any clue at all would mention servicing the International Space Station, or, with
last month’s mission in mind, keeping the Hubble Space Telescope in operation. But then, your respondent could not tell you the point of the station, or give you a comparative-cost analysis of servicing Hubble with shuttles at half a billion per mission
versus just sending up a replacement Hubble on an unmanned launcher. Still less could he explain why any of this was government business.
In fact, the main purpose of the International Space Station is to give the shuttle something to do. So far as Hubble is concerned, most of the construction costs were in planning, design, and development. We could have built half a dozen copies for little more than it cost to build the first, and put a replacement in orbit on an unmanned rocket whenever one conked out, saving ourselves billions in shuttle costs.
CONTINUED 1 2 Next >
