The loopholes on the farm bill are so big that I don’t know why we’re debating legalization at this point.

To meet the 2018 farm bill requirements, your thing needs to have <0.3% delta-9 THC by weight. This opened up the delta-8 market–less potent but you can just add more of it–but that was only the start of exploring the new legal territory this opened up.

10mg of THC delta-9 is considered a good sized dose in edible products. A standard can of soda is about 225 grams. So do the math: 0.01g / 225g = 0.004%. Close to two orders of magnitude under the farm bill limit, and a lot of THC seltzers come in bigger cans than that. You can sell that in every state that hasn’t specifically banned it otherwise.

It gets even better. To get 10mg of THC delta-9, a gummy only needs to be about 3g to make the 0.3% limit. Not that big at all.

That mostly leaves smoking/vaping as the only methods that don’t have an easy loophole.

Just legalize it already. This is stupid.

Speculating here, but taxes are one reason.

Almost all the rules about what counts as wine, beer, whiskey, etc. comes from some country making definitions for tax purposes. Often from hundreds of years ago.

How many people is that going to employ?

Remember, this thread started by saying “smart people” got sidetracked into IT rather than building rockets. There are a lot of problems with that claim, but at the very least, it has to assume that these less important items would be able to employ lots and lots of programmers.

Maybe if they could get in-orbit refueling to work on the Falcon? IIRC, Starship would require that for trips out of LEO, anyway. Nobody has done it before with a crewed rocket, and there’s been some criticism that Starship’s plan relies on this thing that hasn’t been proven.

The Lunar Gateway is supposed to have a final assembled mass of 63 metric tons. May or may not be able to make that work at all with Falcon.

Incidentally, that mission was one of those surprising successes. The drone they sent was really barebones so it could tag along on another mission. Lots of people thought even doing that was a waste of launch mass. Nobody expected it to work all that well. It ended up working incredibly well and got used far beyond its planned mission until its rotor blades broke.

Now the team gets to build a real one.

Forget the moon. We’re all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.

The Falcon series would be very limited for a moon mission. The Saturn V could get 47 metric tons into a trans lunar injection. Falcon 9 can get about 27 metric tons into GTO–not even to TLI (which isn’t even listed in public information I could find, though one random Reddit post claims 3 metric tons). The Apollo lander was 17 metric tons, and it could take two people and a rover for a little tour on the surface. We can maybe shave some of that weight off with a new design, but probably not by half or anything really significant like that.

If we want to go back to the moon, it should be for more than taking pictures and picking up some rocks. You may not even be able to do that with a Falcon rocket.

NASA doesn’t exactly rely on Starship for this, though. SLS does technically exist. It’s just expensive, took far too long to build, and should probably be written off. Bezos might have something coming up, but who knows. Still relying on another space billionaire either way.

No, they would not. The kind of software development done in aerospace is very, very different from the commercial industry at large. Writing 20 lines per week might be considered a breakneck pace because of all the formal verification that needs to be done on every single line.

They followed the money. The US Congress saddled NASA with a mandate for a Shuttle without funding it properly. The Russians never even developed crewed rockets that could do anything interesting beyond LEO. Everyone else wasn’t doing much until the last decade or so.

There have long been plenty of smart people at NASA, and they’re wasted on poor funding and management. It has nothing to do with IT.