Thanks for the feedback. Here's an attempt below at responding; please let me know what you think, I might incorporate it into the piece.

What was your larger rhetorical point?

"Big bucks" claims like NASA's are the intellectual equivalent of schoolyard bullying: they use their reputation and bluster to grab your lunch money, that is, your assent to the claim that Independent Validation and Verification has very high expected value.

Always fact-check and logic-check claims, even when the source has a formidable reputation; certain domains, such as software engineering, are particularly rife with bogus claims and failures of critical thinking from smart people; quantitative claims in particular are often easy to fact-check and logic-check, so that a even self-taught smartass like me (the unathletic weakling in the schoolyard) can stand up to the biggest bullies. "If I can do it, so can you".