Take, for example, Elon Musk in SpaceX. Elon knew enough of rocket science to assemble the early team and participate as a self-assigned chief designer. In many cases such actions would qualify a person as a smart one.

Yes, it's hard to objectively measure - very hard perhaps. Yet we can still allow that some of those billionaires are smart at least by some reasonable measures.

My point is that the evaluation of Musk in that particular passage seem to be also subjective, and other people might have other opinions. We don't see good evidence here - and have some kind of counter-evidence elsewhere.

Yes, it brings effects, and it's a cool technology. But saying that at least idea - or results - are fundamentally changing rocket engines... I think that's a stretch.

There is nothing magical with cooling in space. Just a different environment - a rather well studied already, we send satellites to space for some 70 years almost. Saying there is no solution is incorrect - we have options, we have numbers, we can point to concrete questions and answers.

In addition to technical there could be other reasons to prefer a solution. Some of those reasons can't be stated - for various reasons, like privacy or intuitiveness.

There are some reasons people like that are rewarded, and not all of those reasons are bad.

Suppose you have some analog dataset, say 1000 readings between 0 and 100 V, and your sensor allows to resolve the values up to 0.1 V precision. Now you need to encrypt that data before, say, sending them over radio. How would you do it?