After seven years of work and nearly $1 billion, the Smithsonian has completed the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum's flagship building in Washington, DC.

On October 30, the museum debuted its last-to-open spaceflight exhibition, returning "home" with a gallery devoted to establishing a spacefaring civilization.

"Welcome to 'At Home in Space'!" said curator Jennifer Levasseur, who guided us through a virtual tour of the gallery. "This is the story of long-duration spaceflight in the last few decades. We generally call it 'reaching orbit.'"

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For nearly a quarter of a century, Elon Musk and his essential partner at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, viewed the United States government as El Dorado, the mythical city of gold.

Like machete-wielding treasure hunters, Musk and Shotwell hacked through a tangled jungle filled with lurking carnivores such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as bean counters and regulators. Over time, against long odds, the pair cleared a path for SpaceX to contracts at NASA and the US military. They sued when things did not go their way. They hollered about unfair playing fields. Most importantly, they delivered quality space products to the US government for less.

And so, after a while, SpaceX found El Dorado and a city of contracts.

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NASA does not have, nor want, nuclear weapons. But when it comes to a particular metric that is part of the Artemis Program to land people on the Moon, NASA guards a particular number like it is trying to prevent outsiders from cracking nuclear codes.

I am speaking of the number of Starship launches required to fuel a Starship-based lunar lander in low-Earth orbit such that it can fly out to the Moon, land there, and return to lunar orbit.

This number has been a moving target over the years. The general response from NASA has typically been, 'We don't know for sure, so we're not going to say.' In 2023, for example, the then-director of NASA's Human Landing System, Lisa Watson-Morgan, told Ars, "We have a general idea, but I’m reluctant to say exactly what that is."

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