@GarbageHorse
Membership within the Union is like any contract. Both parties must agree to enter into the contract and both parties must agree to leave. You can’t sign a contract with someone and unilaterally renege on it.
Besides, if half the states were missing there would have been no space travel. No space travel and humans go extinct. No one else would have reached the Moon. That’s why I’m such a big advocate of the space program (and Space Force). The Germans (who invented space travel) lost WW2 three weeks into Barbarossa, so they would have never gotten to the Moon. The Russians knew they couldn’t do it because of their top-down bureaucracy that rewarded party loyalty instead of competence, they just lied to the world to look stronger than they really were. Nothing could have made the N1 rocket work. No Russians on the Moon. China can’t do it no matter how much Winnie the Flu believes he can. All their technology is stolen from the Russians (or stolen from us), and the Russians couldn’t figure out interplanetary travel either. They’re just now building space stations the Russians had already made 40 years ago. They’re population is aging, everything they build falls apart, and they have a debt bubble many times larger than the US, so no Chinese Moon either.
The US built and tested nuclear rockets in the 50s that could have reached Mars in weeks and the outer moons in a few months. Collect Helium-3 from Jupiter, advance tech another century, reach the stars in a single human lifetime. We could have done it then, we had the power, but we lacked the will.