Well, there's the NASA doing manned launches (or nowadays, working towards eventually being able to, to put it charitably) which, as you say, sadly seems co-opt

Well, there's the NASA doing manned launches (or nowadays, working towards eventually being able to, to put it charitably) which, as you say, sadly seems co-opted by pork-barrel interests. But there's also the science side of NASA that does stuff like space probes, the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, and so on. And this side seems to have a better track record (well, post-Apollo at least) of actually delivering something valuable. And, AFAIU it's this side that has chosen the RISC-V based platform for their future work.