To see how wrong this idea is, just consider Israel, India, and China. All three nations have launched domestically designed earth satellites on domestically designed space boosters. During the same period, all three nations tried to produce a domestic jet fighter aircraft design and all three failed dismally.

In fact, at the time each of these three nations launched their first spacecraft, you couldn't have bought a decent personal automobile designed and built in that country.

Seeing as how Israel has had two high-profile failures in the last week (and Arrow ABM and the launch of Offeg-6), the author's point is weak. He might also want to look into the history of Indian and Japanese launch failures to see that this stuff IS still quite difficult, especially when you're trying to get the last 10% of performance out of a design.

As for developing jet fighters or automobiles compared to rockets, it comes down to priorities. For many countries, developing a domestic auto industry just isn't a high priority. China has developed quite a few jet fighters over the years. They started with evolutionary developments of Soviet designs and went much further. Israel had a good fighter design in development but ran into budgetary problems. Aircraft development, especially fighters, is damned expensive (see F/A-22) with a small market to amortize the R&D costs. That leads to high per unit costs, often higher than what it'd cost to purchase existing designs like the F-16. Japan has ran into that problem with their F-2, where very high costs may well doom an otherwise good plane.