"How should it go in outer space? At best it will go as the movement West in America. At worst it will go as the rape of the New World by Spain."
I disagree on your best/worst scenarios, since I think the law and government will not apply at all to extraplanetary travel in the long haul, and I think maybe I should have been clearer on that.
There is as yet no cheap way to get off planet and for the foreseeable future, it'll be more expensive to go up than down. As a result, since it makes more sense to convert resources here to a new use instead of prospecting for them elsewhere as long as that expense must be factored in, ain't no reason to go anywhere.
So until that changes, seems to me the payoff isn't enough to be worth the gamble to most people. And things will have to have really have gotten bad to get folks into privately exploring and settling off-planet space. Foolish governments and people will try to incentivize it and subsidize it, and maybe they will succeed wildly in the gamble. But I doubt it, if only because the environment of space is far harsher than that of the terran New World, and there is far less payoff from that sort of gamble given the investment. Extraplanetary terraforming will be more expensive than starting on the ground and improving what you have for a very long time.
So I think by the time private industry and persons decide in large numbers to hop out of this gravity well, hell will have broken loose down here, and that will be their last hope of escaping hamhanded government. I think the Earth must become an Asimovian high-Empire Trantor before it becomes a planet of spacefarers. But we shall see, I suppose.
Yes, however some development of space resources can be profitable if done well. The 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty and the concomitant lack of private property rights is all that stands in the way of that development.