Beautiful! Lovely piece to admire.

The media isn't really something that changes the minds of most leaders. If you're invading a country, you're going to spend a lot of time thinking about who you're invading

Can't get much more effective than a missile that does the aiming for you. Since missile tech has already had a lot of funding/testing over the years, the missiles become cheaper to manufacture/sell, meaning which means you can just throw more bombs at the problem for the same amount of money.

Could make a really big laser if we just divert a little bit of the military budget though...

You might be thinking of the F-15 that fired the missile. The missile actually had target-seeking capability so really the F-15 was mostly just an expensive missile launcher.

Maube ask Ben what it would take to bring Keith back alive with the body and soul he had soon before the, uh, accident. Or maybe what the price you'll have to pay for those candles?

Wait, you could maybe even get more answers from Ben by getting him some regular meat, right? Hell, he didn't seem picky - maybe even some cheap off-cuts from the butcher's will do!

I'd say you'd need to start spending more time/money on solar panels if the of one really needs it to function. So far, probes seem to be getting by fine with the current panels we put on them so there isn't too much pressure to be focusing on solar panels if they're doing the job well enough.

I think someone else also mentioned this, but adding things like wipers and whatnot would also increase weight. That's weight which could be dedicated to other important parts of the craft. Yes, you'd end up collecting more power and perhaps you'd maintain your solar cells better than before if you cleaned them, but it would take research and development on something that already works well enough.

That said, solar is something that's useful down here on the ground too, so I imagine that takes some pressure off of space agencies develop the tech from the ground up.

Spacecraft engineers would love nothing more than to implement all the features they will/might need if they could afford it. When your budget is determined by the government, ya take what you can get