Great comments, I think a couple of cold ones is required no doubt!

I like your point about Skunk works and how military technology is always well in advanced to the tech the population has at their disposal. No doubt American weapons are far in advance of anything we could imagine at this point.

I don't believe for a minute that the secret black budget for the military space program was only 200 million ( i think that was the number). It must be several orders of magnitude greater than that.

Maybe one of the reasons why the Star Wars programs were shut down was simply because they wanted to take it off the table and away from public scrutiny. Let the public believe they had won but really give the industry carte-blanche to develop all the space weapons and tech they wanted.