Also, not sure if we - the people - really want to hear the solution to this problem from a super-weapon company.
It’s a preliminary request for a quote for a study. This is either meaningless hyperbole or thoroughly uninformed.
The main barrier to building modern rail (i.e. high speed rail) is property owners. Nobody wants to be forced to sell off part of their property to the state to add noise pollution to their property. So everyone fights it tooth and nail.
That's of course a problem and it happens with roads as well but it's standard practice to just eminent domain property for roads if people won't sell. The state will not do this for railroads though. So a railroad project may end up blocked for 20 years because they don't own a 1 mile stretch of land 20 feet wide but with a new highway extension they'll just eminent domain your half your property and bulldose your home after 5 years of negotiating to add a few lanes to an existing road.
This is not to say that eminent domain is a good thing but rather that it's a lot more naunced than "regulators won't rubberstamp the project"
Remember this widely held viewpoint:
> My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable. We're not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable. And we're not going to put a dollar figure on human life
Another short lemma is that having someone leave somewhere they've lived over 10 y is equivalent to violence and we arrive at the proof that grandmas and mothers in the vicinity of anything should stop that thing.
The moon's big advantage is that it lacks women of any sort. Certainly there are no mothers or grandmothers there, so building engineering projects there is possible.
Environmental reviews and construction permits.
I'd prefer that real efforts for such balancing happens even when it adds additional friction and expense because the alternative is significantly worse.