In our world, space exploration began as an offshoot of military technology. We only managed to devote the resources for this because it was easy to swap out a nuclear warhead for a satellite, that would be really handy for aiming the rest of the nuclear warheads that we didn't convert for this. And...

The biggest bottleneck is the %^&#ing trees. I can build an oil refinery in my pocket but I run around shooting trees down with a shotgun. I really don't like to use the construction bots, but sending a swarm of them to make a forest disappear in seconds is the real victory in this game. Then it...

Rather than all your research culminating into building a sure fire rocket that always succeeds you can start building lower tech rockets with a high chance of failure or continue to research and wait until you can launch rockets with a higher chance of success. This would allow different play style...