Having spent 30+ years in the satellite communications racket, I’ve seen a lot of the BS surrounding the commercialization of the space industry (and you can bet that is what’s going on here). Long-March, SeaLaunch, the French down in Guiana, the Russians, all of whom came to the fore when NASA put all of their eggs in the shuttle basket, which then took a crap and left the US without any launch capability. Like so many things, money drives the process. This isn’t the Sixties when resources were relatively unlimited; we’re now in an era where privatization/commercialization is the underlying driver.

My only point in raising all of this is that there are aspects of the current program that look eerily familiar to failed tech from forty years ago. Only time will tell.