Regulations don't prevent you from inventing new things, only from inflicting them onto the whole of the society. But they didn't invent anything useful in the first place, so arguing that regulations were what stopped them is silly.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about how SpaceX or NASA's finances work. But I assumed that, due to their tighter coupling with a government, NASA has less leeway in their decisions of which technologies to research compared to SpaceX.