The concept of sitting down and compromising with evil communists, mad islamists, corrupt dictators and the brain dead European politicians in order to formulate space law is sooo stupid. The president should simply have a commission of experts and businessmen write down a space law.

As for the English, they were always better on things like law making and commerce and naval warfare than on engineering. They looked good for a while simply because they were first, but the Germans and the Japanese easily overtook them by doing things properly. The soft stuff the English have been good at allows for some compromising, there’s never a single exact right answer, but in engineering on the other hand a touch of collective autism is helpful.

As we have seen in the past couple of decades, it is the free market capitalist form of space operations that has seen the most innovation and efficient use of resources. We saw the development of two orbital rockets and two spacecraft under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program at a cost less than the typical development costs of a single governmental orbital rocket.

Free market capitalism has been shown to work better that socialism in all the places that they have been tried. Now we can see that free market capitalism works better for developmental and operational programs as well.

“Britain in the Twentieth Century: Progress and Decline”
This one in particular might be of interest– the 3rd of 6 lectures total, covering the twentieth century exclusively.
“The Attempt to Construct a
Socialist Common Wealth, 1945 – 1951”
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/britain-in-the-20th-century-the-attempt-to-construct-a-socialist-commonwealth

(There’s also the “Poor Act of 1834,” but English History is not my strong suite.

The OST was designed to prevent the very things private space does: open up the solar system to private enterprise. Why *not* just abandon it? We did with the ABM and the sky didn’t fall.

About the UK: it has always been a mystery to me why the society that invented the Industrial Revolution and essentially conquered the planet has been conspicuously absent from space. My speculation is that the socialization of British society in the 1950’s deprived the government of the money to pay for space, and drained the will of the people to do it.