Well, aside from the fact that one of the biggest obstacles to the proliferation of manned spaceflight is a government trapped by the reluctance of taxpayers to act as financiers, it means that we may be hurtling towards a different future than the one envisioned by the likes of Gene Roddenberry. It always struck me as odd that space traffic was under such tight governmental control after the formation of the United Federation of Planets. Now, before anybody brings up the counterexample of how Zefram Cochrane's landmark warp flight in 2061 was a private initiative, or how socio-political factors like a war against an external common enemy (in this case, the Romulan Empire) tends to bring everybody under a single flag, my point here is that under the Federation, private spaceflight all but disappeared. One would think that the private citizens of Earth would have more than just the occasional cargo frieghter to call their own.

What Nick's analysis is missing is that the vast majority of the action on Star Trek takes place on the far reaches (and beyond) of the Federation — the missions of the Enterprises were, after all, to To explore strange new worlds, To seek out new life and new civilizations, To boldly go where no man one has gone before!. Private trading and passenger liners would, one thinks, generally stay out of unexplored and possibly hostile areas, in favour of moving people and things between settled and friendly places.

Think of the golden age of sail, to which Star Trek harkens back so often: while there were certainly private explorers, the vast majority of private traffic was engaged in moving around the European and North American coasts, or perhaps the Carribean basin. The long journeys to round Cape Horn, cross the Pacific, explore the coast of Africa, or seek out the Indies were, while nominally private, heavily state-supported (consider Columbus or Drake!). It wasn't until these areas were charted, the dangers known, and markets for goods discovered that private ships sailed the ocean to move goods around the planet.

The dramatic imperative of the Star Trek universe requires that we rarely see private shipping, except when it serves to provide the Enterprise's crew with something to rescue (Kobayashi Maru, anyone?). The exception to this rule, of course, is Deep Space Nine, which is a trading hub. Just take a look at the station and all the references to private trade, and you'll realize that there is plenty of private space trading going on in the Star Trek universe: it's just that it doesn't move the story forward and/or doesn't take place where the Enterprise, our roving point-of-view into the universe, is.