Yes, and unfortunately the contractors building spacecraft for NASA now are the same ones who built them in the 60s. Competition, in general, spurs innovation and makes things cheaper, and pushing the growth of new startups in the industry would, at the bare minimum, bring new ideas to the fore. Ideally I'm sure the goal is to get private companies more involved in launching and exploration. There are very few around currently, and most of them are still only in the developmental stages. NASA wins by both creating competition, and taking workload off of their own engineers. It also gives incentive for these companies to develop tech on their own, before government budgets come into play.

Just kicking someone down a well seems like a pretty effective process to me.

Yes, and that's the basic unit of evolution. The reconfiguring of genes to create a difference, be it useful, detrimental, or neutral. The fact that wild E. coli have evolved the ability to use citrate shows that this specific mutation has evolved multiple times within the population, which is entirely reasonable given the time between each reproductive cycle of E. coli. The problem with most creationists is that they'll keep arguing with you until you can show them an E. coli population that all spontaneously jumped out of their petri dishes and grew large enough to absorb an entire human. Until then, it's that awful made-up term "micro-evolution."

The argument you seem to either be ignoring or misunderstanding is that we have absolutely no way of knowing whether a fossil is Grandpa or Grandpa's cousin. Ardi, for example, could be the progenitor of all modern humans, or it could be a closely related cousin to the primate that gave rise to us. There is no way of knowing more than that without rewinding history and watching who gave birth to who.

That's exactly what they've been doing lately. SpaceX is in the process of becoming the primary provider of resupply missions to the ISS for when the shuttle program ends.

Fuel cells.