We have DSN already. As for the moon, it is a nightmare to orbit. Its density is very lumpy, which means orbits around it are constantly being perturbed, and that means you need to bring an annoying amount of propellant if you want to remain stable.

Don't they usually manage that by having the broadcast be slightly delayed?

NASA had roughly $3B to spend on this specific part of production.

NASA's public affairs office got decimated in budget cuts.

You better run over there and let them know.

Go take a look at how much this costs compared to the rest of the federal budget. I think you'll be surprised by how little money NASA gets.

Now, the military...

NASA is something like the third biggest space program in the US

Oh, don't worry, we did figure that out. What we haven't figured out yet is how to stop Congress from involving themselves in engineering decisions.

Well, we should have figured that out with the STS. That's what the STS was for - figuring out what technologies made for inexpensive, rapid spaceflight and which technologies don't.

Then the senate mandates the new rocket to use specifically the most expensive, problematic, least reliable technology. Completely designed to fail.

Have such hopes for the Starship.

If you read the actual rule the exceptions are relatively well defined. Stuff like pythonista falls into their educational/coding app exception as they define it

The entire rule is as follows:

Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user.

There are not "exceptions"; there is one exception, and that's educational apps. But it's unclear why Pythonista is educational while the apps mentioned in the article are not. In fact, Pythonista is even listed in the "Productivity" section in the App Store.

That's not really how risk is managed in aviation. ICAO will have made a list of all possible ways a power bank could create a hazard. Then for each failure mode, they'll come up with two numbers: probability, and severity. There's a formula to combine those two numbers into a single risk score. Any risks over the acceptable threshold (varies depending on the circumstances and I can't remember what it is for human-rated transport) must be mitigated.

A mitigation is anything that reduces the probability or the severity of a risk. There are different categories of mitigation, some of which are more robust than others. Once the risk score moves below the acceptable threshold, the risk is satisfactorily mitigated.

Example: Rapid depressurization. Without mitigation, the risk of rapid depressurization is unacceptably high. So we mitigate the probability by requiring sensitive inspections for metal fatigue, and we mitigate the severity by providing oxygen masks, a standard flight crew procedure for making an emergency descent, and regular training on that procedure. (Plus a bunch of other things I'm not thinking of off the top of my head.)

Assuming ICAO did their due diligence - and I don't have any reason to think they didn't - they would've assessed the probability and severity of all of the ways a consumer power bank might fail. That analysis is the rationale for both the number of power banks allowed on a flight and what you're allowed to do with them. And yes, they will have considered the probability of people not following the rules (which is the reason, btw, that airplane lavatories have enormous "no smoking" signs right above an ash tray).

I don't see where that's contradicting my comment.

There's a large body of evidence on the damage that social media can do to people, and on the engineered compulsion to use it.