Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but surely taxpayers subsidizing billionaires’ rocket testing and allowing the gains to be privatized is a net loss for society, no?
SpaceX gets almost $900 million in federal subsidies to deliver broadband to rural America https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/08/tech/spacex-starlink-subsidie...
SpaceX just won $885 million in federal subsidies to expand Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite-internet project https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/spacex-just-won-do...
In addition to that SpaceX is government contractor.
SpaceX and Blue Origin are the next Boeing/Lockheed. Government gives them both money to R&D so that they don't have just one innovative supplier.
Tesla is a great example of government project. Tesla has received $3-4 billion in subsidies.
edit:
SpaceX has received other direct subsidies. NASA has given seed money and development funding for Dragon, Falcon 9, engines and demonstration launches ($248M at least) https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/453605main_Commercial_Space_Minutes...
$3-4 billion = 3 weeks of federal food stamps spending
I know which I think is the better government expenditure
A hand out is bailing out failing auto makers, forgiving debt arbitrarily, etc, etc.
We're in a "Give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" type hypothetical now.
People are engaged in heated normative[1] discussion with little or no facts. I am not. Even saying Tesla is a great example of a government project does not mean it's good or bad. Just a great example.
I just wanted to add some facts to the discussion. Not enough, but some. I think it would be great to find out the total indirect and direct subsidies these companies receive, but I could not find it.
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1: Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good or desirable or permissible and others as bad or undesirable or impermissible.
It's important to note that SpaceX is different from most space-related government contractor in that they mostly sell a packaged service, whereas other contractors before it had development contracts. Boeing / ULA etc were paid to develop launchers, SpaceX sells launches. (I know that SpaceX benefited from subsidies towards achieving that, but their competitors did not achieve that or even tried.)
The key difference is that they are not (entirely) incentivized on sucking on the subsidies teats. That the US government pays them to provide a public service makes them more akin to any utility than to typical government contractors.
I think this is the same way as Boeing and others get their money for development.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, New Horizons, Starliner crew capsule ... basically all NASA and DoD launches come from ULA.
There's no guarantee that taxpayers money would be used for a better endeavor if it was used otherwise.
And the very definition of better endeavor is pretty shaky in any case.
So one can debate on whether optimal resource allocation is done by the government or private individuals, but it is not 'surely' better to have the government allocate the resources.
Will there be any element of cheap subsidised access to space in return for the government's investment?
Or is it exactly what it seems to be - a no-strings handout?
As for better endeavours - perhaps you're underestimating the economic utility of a single payer health care system which wouldn't bankrupt 500,000 individuals a year. (For example.)