The Eads bridge[1] is also an example of a very early (opened in 1874) use of steel. I don't know about how over engineered it is, but it is still used for automobile and light rail today.
Starship is a devastatingly powerful space access and logistical transport mechanism that will instantly crush the relevance of every other rocket ever built.
If I am a launch provider other than SpaceX, I'm out of business in probably 3-5 years.
In the middle of 1966, Robert Taylor took over the directorship of Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)[1]. It was Taylor who launched the project that produced ARPANET. This is a great history series on ARPANET, starting with "ARPANET, Part 1: The Inception."[2]
"One of the really interesting interesting things to contemplate is the total mass to orbit capability of a large reusable system where you have a significant fleet in operation. If you've got something like Starship where you've got maybe 150 tons capable to orbit and the ship can fly, is capable of say theoretically flying four times a day but you know they call it like 75 percent uptime so theoretical three times a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. So that's like about a thousand flights a year for the ship. The booster can do a lot more than that. This is obviously max theoretical. You've got, you know, 150 tons that service, 150,000 tons to orbit per year per ship. If you've got say ten ships you'd have [...] one and a half million tons to orbit per year. Twenty ships you've got three million tons to orbit per year. I think the total rest of world capacity, if you take all rockets on earth including Falcon, the total capacity to orbit I think is around two to three hundred tons currently. Total Earth capacity to orbit is about two to three hundred tons if all rockets launched at max rate. So we're talking about something that is with a fleet of starships a thousand times more than all earth capacity combined. All other rockets combined would be 0.1% including ours."
How is this not massively disruptive to the entire space launch industry?
Also see the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation (APOLLO)[0]: "APOLLO measures the round-trip travel time of laser pulses bounced off the lunar retroreflectors[1] to a precision of a few picoseconds, corresponding to about one millimeter of precision in range to the moon."
Check out the book The Wright Brothers by David McCullough[1]. You will see that they are anything but tinkerers, but more the founders of aeronautical engineering.
This is by the author of "The Switch"[0], a history of the electronic switch. I found the series fascinating and am looking forward to this new series on the Internet.
If you have a face-to-face conversation with a friend (assuming no eavesdropping devices are around) everything you say "self destructs". You'll feel freer to say certain things knowing that they will only persist in your friend's memory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eads_Bridge