If China had "no regulations" and was building out 100% coal, no one would be worrying that China industry would have an advantage due to low electricity cost vs rest of world.
So I haven't looked through the comments, and assume this has been discussed, but the simple solution is to limit contracts to, say, $4M, and pay only on successful completion. Then build a large project through a series of smaller steps.
To me, the interesting question is, were they the first to come up with the concept of communicating while jumping around on a random-like sequence of frequencies. What was the prior art?
It will be interesting to see who owns all the compute hardware in a few years, that cost billions now, and what becomes of it. With an expected useful lifetime so short the depreciation rate is insane.
I find the article unconvincing, although I'm open to being convinced. With historical hindsight, it should be easy to see if the Lamarr et al patent seems novel. Just because an examiner doesn't allow a claim, I don't see that as strong evidence it wasn't novel at the time. They always are rejecting claims, sometime for good reason, sometimes not.
A more convincing article would focus on purported prior art patents, and let the reader judge if really anticipated frequency hopping.
Also, it took 10 and 14 seconds to switch them back on. If it was an accidental switch, you would think it would have been quicker to switch them back.
You mention "brain fart". There is certainly a long history of pilots selecting the wrong lever, or wrong switch. So, it is possible the pilot who denied switching the fuel off thought he had switched something else.
Transmission lines are a interesting idea, but expensive.
Once solar is cheap (like now, as it already is), you can put in 3x what is needed on a sunny day, and power everything on cloudy days. Solar runs on cloudy days. Night obviously requires a different solution. Start by installing solar over all parking lots.
To think that you won't be able to run a 100% solar/wind grid is a bet against human ingenuity. If generation in excess of peak demand was installed of solar/wind, there are many promising approaches to deal with generation shortfalls. Batteries, load shifting, an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in, precooling a home with AC during the day to a low set point so AC isn't needed at night, H2 storage in salt caverns, pumped hydro, aluminum smelters that operate during excess power periods, the possibilities are infinite.
It won't be hard. Don't bet against human ingenuity.
Against the cost of a lower payload fraction. Say you get 4% with TSTO, 2% with SSTO. And if you run into trouble with the design, the SSTO payload moves towards 0%. Your operational savings need to compensate for a doubling of cost per unit mass payload, possibly much more.
And even though full reusability is much easier with two stages, and has not been achieved yet.