Right; so you realize this isn't a certainty. If raw numbers mattered why didn't China and India get to the moon first? They had billions more people than the US this whole time.

Signal propagation through a populace is physical scaling problem. A future pandemic here, populist revolt there; long dead dear leaders efforts fall apart.

See the end of New Deal as that generation died off. So my point stands the content of future political discourse and economic policy matters; despite billions more people in India and China in the 1960s, they were not chanting "we choose to go to the moon".

They were far more tribal societies back then. See America becoming more tribal and norms falling apart.

Will keep relying in my first hand experience engineering hardware, seeing with my own eyes how difficult stable signal propagation is.