I disagree.
I knew Bob Truax.
If the US had simply offered a series of prizes for milestones toward the first man on the moon, it would have been accomplished with Truax’s Sea Dragon – financed by someone like Howard Hughes.
But then there is no “Control USA” for me to refer to in making the case for my macrosocial theory of causality, is there? Hence my repeated insistence that we either be permitted to allocate territory according to assortative migration of proponents of different social theories or – failing that (because it’s just “too inefficient” (hehe)) – then invest the proper amount of money in lossless compression of a wide range of longitudinal social measures to discover causality.
That we are denied BOTH is unforgivable and is the reason the West is heading into a rhyme with the 30 Years War.
These are existential issues.