The amount of money they get for signing on is so staggeringly huge, it is one of the drivers of the high inflation they are having.

Still being one of the luckiest people in aviation accident history, he may just have opened the door and stood there, and when the plane hit the ground been thrown by chance in the direction out.

Thinking about it, this is probably the best option, statistically. Timing the jump has virtually no chance of succeeding, but if you stand by the door you have an almost 25% chance of being thrown out the right way.

We may very well in the future, of course! But maybe at the rate technology develops, it could be smarter to start working on it when the threat becomes visible.

I venture the uneducated guess that satellite to satellite might be the next space defense frontier ahead of space to ground.

I think it's because the threat model against which a Golden Dome defends is just not that plausible any longer. Given the distances, a space-based ground defense can only protect from long-range attacks, like ICBMs. Unlike in the 80s, the technology to intercept and destroy ICBMs safely is now probably there, but the threat of all out nuclear war is much reduced.