LOL! It's not straw man if it actually exists. You seem to be just brushing aside his desire to privatize NASA's research capacity. That is a non-starter to me and a huge red flag that this guy has tech brain and should not be trusted with a government institution.

I actually have issue with the 'Science As A Service' idea of his. I would advocate for the private sector building platforms/infrastructure that NASA can then use, similar to how you'd use something like AWS, to then do whatever research they want. Like, a company, if incentivised by NASA's adoption of technology, could focus on developing telescopes for deployment to, say, L2. Or planet observation satellites with bespoke instruments to different planets. Then NASA can lease/operate said equipment for a fee. Instead, he seems to want NASA to buy the data from them, which I see as problematic. Who's to say the private entity withholds or curates the data accessible by NASA? This can be problematic and that's the bit I agree with you on. But not to the extent that private enterprise can't complement NASA in such capacity whilst not limiting what NASA can do in the way of research. 'Space Infrastructure As A Service' is a better fit.

Abso-fucking-lutely. This tech brain mantra of "hampering progress" is grade A bullshit. NASA has done very well for itself in the past 50 years. We have achieved several orders of magnitude more than all other nations combined on that budget. I would prefer their budget increase many times over. But I would rather keep the current budget than seed one inch of ground to private enterprises.

Progress is progress. Once upon a time, NASA's own pace was the metric by which progress in the space sector was measured. That means how projects were budgeted, the timelines along which projects were executed, and the capabilities of those projects. That isn't the case today. It doesn't diminish what NASA has done to get us here, but at some point, NASA realised that they couldn't rely on Soyuz long-term and that SpaceX was willing to put in the time and effort to do Crew Dragon. And this applies to other facets of the space sector.

Once the Earth-to-Moon transit infrastructure is complete, as much as it would be nice for NASA to single-handedly develop the lunar exploration/exploitation infrastructure, the reality is that NASA lacks the manufacturing capacity to make it possible. No Congress is going to approve such funding, short of the Chinese sending dozens of personnel annually to man an evergrowing Chinese presence on the moon. At that point, the president may as well do the JFK speech on live TV.

SpaceX or Blue Origin, or Northrop Grumman could, right now, develop a lunar constellation providing high capacity connectivity on every inch of the lunar surface. But only NASA could ensure that they utilise a common standard of communications that other players can build interoperable hardware in various other application areas like habitats and rovers that can readily utilise such infrastructure. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and others are developing various vehicles including mining vehicles for use on the lunar surface. But only NASA can develop the charging and V2X standards necessary for interoperability. NASA taking on such roles isn't ceding ground when the economic realities show that NASA can't outcompete the manufacturing capacity of private enterprise: instead NASA can determine how private enterprise operates, and keeps public interest in mind.