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Is it fair to categorise Space-X as "the winner of the competition designed by NASA to find a way to build rockets without having Senators interfere?"

As in, SpaceX hired the engineers from NASA, got paid by NASA and basically built the rockets that were in fetal at NASA?

I am not saying nothing innovative happened, I am asking is the difference taking the same engineers out of NASA or is there something else?

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What about lockheed martin, boeing and blue origin then. They also recruit from the same pool of engineers. LM/ULA gets paid even better with their cost+ contracts. LM/ULA even after getting paid handsomely are way behind in terms of cost/kg or human launchers.

That's fair - but I suspect the same bureaucracy exists in Lockheed et al, as do the incentives to please senators / government that feed the next round of spending.

The simple answer is to prevent small numbers of people having outsize influence on massive spending. So for example, billionaires...

This is a thing I have been noodling on for ages but have no answers other than "you need a clear mission and people at the top focused on that mission even if they are not clear their retirement packages are secure"

(or maybe their retirement packages were secure some way in ...)

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