I'm not sure that's truly the case here, but it does seem like the tech Project Suncatcher is working on has at least some overlap with requirements for military SIGINT and in-orbit imagery processing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_C...
It's getting quite tiresome.
And the preliminary design shapes aren't unknown. They just have huge ass solar panels and radiators. Plenty of space in ... space.
And why haven’t these genius engineers delivered on basically any of Musk’s promises on time? Or at all, in many cases?
You have the entirely wrong impression of people here. TONS of people are saying exactly that, and trying to disqualify the whole debate.
>likely for years to come
Starship is putting its first business payload to orbit in two days. The craft represents making mass to orbit magnitude(s) cheaper. Read the text on your side mirrors.
>any of Musk’s promises on time
I find this argument so frivolous. Ok, so they've made what was considered impossible, _late_ on a few occasions? And they visibly iterate, showing failure, as if it makes them somehow worse? It does kind of sound like you are not the engineering type, or at least don't work with actual hard problems.
The smartest people are still geniuses and the smartest even if they're late, while no one else is ahead of them.
There's a case to be made that a substantial part of the mobile/social web revolution of the Aughties was at least in part propelled by the exploding budget of the security state post-9/11. LifeLog, In-Q-Tel, a bucket of other programs that have straight-line-relationships with the various Web 2.0 shenanigans. The CIA point man for these operations are recognizable today as some of the new generation of American semi-governmental oligarchs.
This last year I read that the early Stingrays only worked because they were engineered in from the IMSI standards - it was backdoored at the spec level, not the design level, not the manufacturing level.
When you step back a moment it makes sense. Who's funding a wireless information infrastructure to every American on the continent, not to mention a sea change in mobile computing manufacturing and development. Different tooling, different design systems, different everything, massive scale . . . what, paid for with advertising? Are you saying Mad Men is paying for all this? That seemed and seems . . . unlikely.