It looks a lot like a cross between the shuttle and the old project Dyna-Soar (I think that was a skunkworks project). Most who remember the TV show 6 million dollar man, that was footage of a DynaSoar's unsuccessful landing

You paint with too broad a brush. But the balance is far too even to pass even modest R&D budgets, especially in the pure science fields. Show them either a direct and imminent threat or a pot of gold to be made and the budget will suddenly appear.

They just aren't alowed to use the federal funds the contract allocated to them.

Boeing has stated that their space R&D budget is dependent on the NASA contract. Airframes still make the most of their profit, but due to subdivision, space dev cannot touch thouse proceeeds. I don't know if that was a "threat" or if they are really so stratified that they would shut down that division without the NASA funding.

Production sysops and sysadmins are not going to adopt systemd until it's not only stable, but unavoidable. Sysadmins need to keep the servers/services running at all costs and cannot afford the time to troubleshoot a new init-script. After the next generation or two, plus mission critical services/apps require systemd will you see a more wide-spread adoption of systemd in the production environment.

'Til then, the developers and early adopters and power-users can knock themselves out tweaking and polishing and enhancing systemd until it is ready for primtime.

Zero traffic deaths? Difficult to stop drivers/cars trying to beat a changing light, but for light jumpers, it is possible to erect a traffic light controlled small barrier at the stop line that will prevent cars from jumping the lights. Just use pneumatic or hydrolic actuators to raise a plat 45 degrees facing the cars at the stop line, goes down when the light turns green.