Comment by willy_k

The point now isn’t having better rockets for (ballistic) missiles, since satellites became a thing the game has been infrastructure. Future (hypothetical) missions to the moon and mars might not be for military research purposes directly, but the infrastructure that both needs to be and now can be set up to support those missions will absolutely be co-opted for military purposes.

The race is now to bootstrap your nation’s permanent presence in space, because at the moment there is a first mover opportunity for what is slowly but surely becoming just another frontier for economics, geopolitics, etc. to play out over (granted this is already happening, I suppose I’m talking about a step change in scale).