Elon is from South Africa…which is home to the Palabora open pit mine…located in what once was a volcanic plug/Kimberlite pipe.

That thing looks like a scaled-up R-7 pit. A good Arecibo replacement if nothing else?

Where Zack from CSI STARBASE was talking about keeping water out…. maybe it is best to keep it in

I wonder if there are pit mines on islands or blue holes with sturdy rock.

Locks like in Panama might allow huge articles to be floated over the top.

I think the first-listed of your five contributing factors dominates the rest. For many years it was fine for Space Launch System (SLS) development to be a cost-plus “forever war” because there was no actual opponent. Now there is. And that makes all the difference.

After 1949 there was a lot of recrimination in Congress about “Who lost China?” No current occupant of that institution now wishes to have to answer questions about “Who lost to China?”

Richard M: Your points are all true. However, reread the first few paragraphs of my essay. No matter what happens with the authorization bill, it is largely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Much more important will be the actual actions of Isaacman and Trump.

It took a long time to get here.

I think….there are at least five reasons why Isaacman *seems* to have had some more success in getting Senate buy-in on more commercialization than Jim Bridenstine did in 2019:

1. The Chinese are much more of a looming threat to land men on the Moon than they were in 2019, and unfortunately this is the kind of thing that still motivates a number of congresscritters;
2. In the last seven years, SLS/Orion has managed only one launch, follow on upgrades are far behind schedule, and even Ted Cruz can now see that this is not a recipe for successfully dealing with development (1);
3. The commercial alternatives on offer (Starship, New Glenn especially) are a lot more mature in development than they were 7 years ago, and they *also* now employ a lot more workforce in certain key space states than they did 7 years ago;
4. Jared Isaacman seems to be a good deal more persuasive and politically adept than most of us expected;
5. It’s a different batch of senators than NASA had to deal with in 2010 or 2019. I’m not so sure that Richard Shelby or Bill Nelson would have gone along with all this, even with (1), (2), and (3). But they’re retired now, and their successors are a little more pliable, maybe less hardened sinners.

But we gotta see what the House does now. I suspect most of this will survive there. The Senate was always the locus of resistance to commercial efforts.

This applies to most of what Congress does.

Thank goodness they have finally started to get rid of Old Space and it’s methods and costs.