The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.

I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.

To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.

Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.

An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.

Ygg and cjdns are the same from a cosmetic point of view just different developers.

IMO ygg is easy to install, cjdns was adding some new dev things that complicated the non developer experience, but that was a few years ago

The point was to put routing and privacy at the foundation of "the internet"

It was mostly a response to the knowledge of prolific government and corporate spying. There are public nodes to piggyback on the legacy internet but it's another project that let's users build and control their own infrastructure, e.g. mesh-local

Also see CJDNS, darknet project and hyperboria

As for spaceX and starship, I haven't kept up with it but I trust it's still putting NASA to shame wrt setting the state of the art.