Brandon Weichert

SpaceX exists to put humans on Mars, so its shift toward the Moon looks like an admission that the Mars dream has stalled. It isn't, argues this analysis. The Moon is a closer, more forgiving testbed for the technologies a Mars colony will need, from harvesting ice for rocket fuel to surviving deep space, and its shallow gravity could make it a cheaper launchpad to the Red Planet. With China racing to claim the lunar high ground, going to the Moon first may be the only realistic way SpaceX ever reaches Mars.

For more than a decade, America's X-37B spaceplane has quietly circled the Earth for months, even years, at a time, running classified experiments that foreign intelligence agencies could only guess at. Now China has its own reusable military spaceplane, the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” and it has been seen releasing objects into orbit and maneuvering near them. A monopoly the United States held alone is over, and this analysis argues the real space race won't be won on the Moon or Mars, but in the ability to maneuver, inspect, and fight in orbit.

Everyone is fixated on Mars. But there is a closer world, and a stranger idea. The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead, crushed under 90 times Earth's pressure. Climb 30 miles into its sky, though, and the conditions turn shirt-sleeve mild: the pressure matches Earth's, the temperature sits near room temperature, and ordinary breathable air would float a habitat like a balloon. That is the premise behind NASA's HAVOC concept, a fleet of crewed airships drifting through the clouds of Venus, and the argument that the easier first step for human spaceflight may not be Mars at all.

They say the Russians love hard places to live. Siberia is the most prominent example of this. Apparently, though, the Russians also like dangerous planets.

On paper, the Navy's Wasp-class ships are amphibious assault ships, built to land Marines, helicopters, and vehicles on a hostile shore. But load one with around 20 F-35B stealth fighters in a “Lightning Carrier” configuration, and it becomes something else: a light aircraft carrier, capable of generating real combat airpower without tying up one of the Navy's scarce, costly supercarriers. It's a trick the Navy increasingly values against China, if the big ships can survive the missiles.

In 1974 the CIA pulled off one of the most audacious operations of the Cold War. Using billionaire Howard Hughes and a cover story about deep-sea mining, it built a 600-foot ship with a giant mechanical claw to secretly raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine, the K-129, from three miles down on the Pacific floor, right under Moscow's nose. The claw broke partway up and half the sub fell back into the abyss. But what the CIA recovered, and how, remains classified to this day.

The Space Shuttle is remembered as an engineering marvel, but this analysis argues it was also one of NASA's costliest strategic mistakes. Sold as a cheap, reusable path to routine spaceflight, it instead ran about $450 million a mission, trapped American astronauts in low-Earth orbit for two decades, and led NASA to mothball the heavy-lift rockets that had taken Apollo to the Moon. By the time the program ended in 2011, the United States had no replacement, and had to pay Russia for rides to orbit.

In the 1950s, American engineers set out to build the ultimate weapon: a nuclear-powered cruise missile that could fly almost indefinitely, cross oceans, and rain hydrogen bombs across the Soviet Union one city at a time. Project Pluto worked. Its unshielded reactor also sprayed radioactive exhaust along its entire flight path, poisoning everything beneath it before a single bomb fell. By 1964 it was so terrifying that the people who built it talked themselves into killing it.

During what was supposed to be his final flight aboard the legendary SR-71 Blackbird, former Reconnaissance Systems Officer (RSO) Richard “Butch” Sheffield experienced the kind of emergency that sounds so extraordinary it couldn't have possibly happened

China continues to defy expectations with its massive military buildup. As the Americans tut-tut about whatever overpriced and underperforming manned system, like the F-47 sixth-generation warplane , they're splurging gobs of tax dollars on, the Chinese just quietly created an entirely new class of relatively affordable warship.