Warning: Big pile of text, Decomposing definitions

I notice that there's a lot of disputably-relevant axes for assessing if something is a moonshot, and that was making me hesitant to answer. So... I'm going to be "that guy" who deep-dives defining terms. Hopefully this will be constructive?

Here are some disputable axes for assessing "moonshots" that popped to mind:

• How possible is it to profit off of incremental progress on this project's sub-goals?
  • At the limit: Does it have to be completely unprofitable until you win, after which there is a steep, step-like function after which there are massive returns?
    • But even space wasn't this extreme! There were rockets and missiles before there were rocket ships. And my loose understanding of the way Elon Musk is doing things is about as incremental as you can make space rockets and still have it be rocket science (admittedly: not very). Those many fancy landing-control tests don't make the final launch not a moonshot, though.
  • At lower levels: At what point is this just the kind of "profitable-incremental-progress via selection" algorithm that capitalism encourages and supports just fine?
• How severe was the projects "start-up cost"? How much hard-to-consolidate infrastructure, intelligence, data, and resources were required before this project was even conceivable?
• For one reason or another, is the most plausible counterfactual that if this one group wasn't doing this, no group would be doing this? Or would be doing this much more poorly?
• Classically, megaprojects refer to large-scale works of architectural infrastructure, but we live in an information age. Do massive broadly-beneficial projects of informational infrastructure count, or not?
• How much of humanity needs to be impacted by the outcome of this project? Does the outcome need to be beneficial? Or is this really about affecting the narrative humanity has about itself, and not the effect it has on the day-to-day way that people experience their lives? (ex: space projects)

(And... interesting! ryan_b selected a almost completely different set of axes. Maybe it's not a particularly consistently-defined concept?)

I feel conflicted about including any of these as requirements (several don't actually seem that desirable), but I think the normal way moonshots are thought of and defined tends to center around analogy to the Space Race. And therefore, tends to involve almost all of these features being present.

"No incremental progress measures" seems like a particularly key part of the definition, and yet a potentially negative thing to filter by. Whenever you can, good incremental progress assessment is usually a positive thing to add to a project.

Thought experiment: If you had to compare 2 identical cold-fusion projects, one of which came up with a bunch of intermediate steps and tested them, and one which didn't and just had one big "did you get everything right?" assessment right at the end... which one is the moonshot? But which one is probably the better project?

Under this lens, there's a pretty important distinction to be made between things that are being treated as moonshots, and problems that have to be approached as moonshots.

Maybe the right question is... "What are moonshot problems that someone is seriously tackling?" Or just dropping the moonshots framing, and getting a list of interesting megaprojects. Or just picking the 1-2 axes you most care about, and sorting on them explicitly.

(FWIW; any one of those is a valid thing to want, and it's a good question! That is part of why I put in the effort to try to break it down.)

P.S. Is there some way I should have used the Question-on-a-Question / Related Question function to do this? If so, could someone walk me through how that's supposed to work?