How on brand.

Much like Zuck didn't understand Snow Crash.

...and one of them will make a video presentation worthy of Shakespeare?

In a way, we are fortunate that there is a new, dominant private space company with a caricature of a CEO. Instead of New Space quietly amassing power over the next few decades, Musk has done it quickly and very noisily, which means more people will be pressuring the government to guarantee competition and establish accountability.

That was the old cost-plus reality. But at least one company has made the new fixed-price contract thing work out. Others will figure it out.

Those factories are being kept plenty busy by the upgrade from Minuteman to Sentinel, so there is no need to give them make work.

Nah, NASA has a ton of people doing amazing technical and scientific work. We're going to frickin' Europa! Even the stuff that's a dead end, I blame management (Congress) much more than anyone at NASA.

As for landing on the Moon's regolith, that's why they're putting the landing rockets way up on the sides of Starship. So the "only" tricky part is making sure the legs are robust enough to handle a dusty, not perfectly flat surface.

How many of Boeing's "A" engineering team members do you think have left over the last 20 years?

It's going to take them a while of, um, turning the rudder to get Boeing flying right again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Big picture, it's good infrastructure to have some redundancy of the geographic sort like this. I mean, ideally throughout the supply chains for each tier of chip. Or anything you want a steady supply of.

You wrote: if we got into a 'space race' with, say, China

If? Seems to be well underway, both for who gets people back to the moon first (in this decade...) and possibly then who has the first base doing anything interesting or useful.

The first Chinese station bigger than Mir, the first commercial station, and the first Falcon 9 and Starlink competitors, will also have some bragging rights.

The military space race is well underway, from surveillance to communications to weapon platforms and how to attack and protect such satellites, to crew and cargo transport, etc.

And some day, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or SpaceX, or someone will start regularly flying the huge backlog of rich people who want to go to space. By the time this gets going, there really may really be a space hotel (see commercial space station, above) for them to go to.

(Vader's final words.)

Dumb terminal-to-mainframe, personal computers, server-client ("smart" clients), cloud computing & (originally underpowered) phones, computing on phones (and in browsers generally with WASM), computer history doesn't repeat exactly but it sure does rhyme a lot. (Also see synchronous/asynchronous, and other related pendulums.)

Of course for any given challenge the requirements, and the tools available, vary both in general over time, and depending on many variables in the specific context.

And conversely, GDP doesn't reflect the immense value in the hours people (mostly women) are putting in to parenting, home care, etc. Marilyn Waring's mind was blown when she got into politics & economics and realized all this. The documentary Who's Counting? walks through it all, it's a few decades old but still on target.

There has been some effort to define a "wellbeing economy" with different metrics lately, but apparently it still doesn't address the gaps. Waring spoke to that effort in https://marilynwaring.com/publications/still-counting.asp. On Google Books.

> The states in play change every election cycle

Even if the states in play were randomly different each election cycle (which they're not, they're usually mostly the same as the election before), we would still get results which better match what the people want if every state distributed electoral votes by percentage rather than all-or-none.

Or you could just go by national vote! There is an effort by the states to bypass the electoral college, it just needs a few more states to pass it to succeed. https://ballotpedia.org/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact