Darien

Rocket Factory, almost antipodal to Rocket Lab, messed it all up in the Shetlands. Scotland since (by law) 1707 is not independent of England so shares its Civil Aviation Authority. Which Authority, being British, is astonishingly nasty as this planet's bureaucracies go, much worse than our FAA. So: why can't Scotland speed up their spacery?

The Rosinante reviews actually mention this, those books being musings about South Sea Bubble schemes. The Scots were deeply implicated in such, John Law having messed up the French monarchy, terminally. Less known (to me) is how the Scots had messed up their own Glasgow-Edinburgh band of Britain. This was the Darien scheme.

Back in the 1600s, pretty much all the European nations (excepting Portugal) were planting colonies and settlements all over "The West Indies", so-called. This region expanded from La Florida (as defined in the Madrid peace 1670) all the way to Panama. Spain could not control all these coasts. The French gobbled western Saint-Domingue and Louisiana; the Dutch had substantial islands as well, and even the Swedes and Latvians got into the game.

So: Panama. The famous captain Morgan - a Welshman - had done a famous raid upon a Spanish fort over there. As of the last decade of the 1600s, a good patch of Panama had gone uninhabited by The White Man. At the time the Scots were feeling some economic pain and figured, hey, why not us?

Scotland and England were united under a common royal family, the Stuarts, of Breton descent but with a long history as Scottish kings and a shorter one over England. William of Orange had taken over both lands, being William II of Scotland (III of England - its second conqueror, mayhap). When the Scots wanted a colony, William - neither Scottish nor English himself - didn't much want to do it, but agreed to it.

If the Scots had paid any attention, they might have asked, why, two centuries after Columbus, nobody else had hit up this coast yet. We now know this region as The Darien Gap. It is arguably the second worst span between the oceans, vying only with the Drake Passage. We wouldn't see a Panama Canal until the nineteenth century I think. Even today the Darien Gap has no highways, because a highway simply cannot be built in this mountainous insect-infested diseased jungle. South Americans get killed there on the regular.

Long story short - I haven't read a history beyond la wik - 80% of these settlers died and everyone else noped out back to Scotland. Scotland now had NO MONEY NO MONEY NO MONEY. We're no longer talking Caribbean Age Of Exploration; we're now onto This Time Is Different. The Act of Union in AD 1707 would be written on English terms, by the London Parliament under a foreign king.

Gilliland, whose name is French, may not have known about the Darien debacle, but assuredly was familiar with John Law at least. Space exploration could mean space speculation, and the latter is a grave of nationstates.