SpaceX at least doesn't appear to be building a business model based on being a barrel for pork with a board that functions as a pension fund for military generals.
From my comment, you didn't suppose I believed government space capabilities and projects should be entirely shut down, or that they should be left to old space companies to continue extorting taxpayers, did you?
Providing a service to the government is not a problem. This is not some kind of libertarian purity test I'm concerned about. It is about ripping off tax payers with lobbyists and the military industrial political revolving doors.
I mean it really is a pretty bad question because you've not taken even 60 seconds to learn the first thing about SpaceX
It isn't.
> There isn't enough history yet to compare them fairly.
I compare them on what they provide for what cost right now, and the kind of company that they appear to be building as of now. Hopefully it was clear that I wasn't making predictions about the future.
Yes, that is how they fund their operations. No one else is giving out billions of dollars to build rockets.
At the same time they are using that money to
1. Create full reusabilty.
2. Drop launch costs 10 to 100 fold.
3. Massively increase payload and launch capability.
Which is the point of this particular thread. The other launch groups have pocketed (hundreds of) billions of dollars and changed almost nothing over the past few decades.
Maybe SpaceX does, maybe it will. But providing launch services to the military and undercutting the companies that definitely do those things is not a problem to me. This wasn't a military = bad rant.