That is the thing: all rocket building organisations before SpaceX were actually government job programs. The goal was not to build cost efficient rockets. The goal was to maintain a large pool of trained aeronautic engineers and technicians for strategic defence purpose.
at best. at the _very_ best.
IMO the real goal was keep constituents happy and the votes coming in to stay in power as long as possible.
Sort of. There's a reason why (some) modern rockets are based on the first generation of ICBMs instead of later versions[1].
The military pretty quickly figured out that operationally, SRB based ICBMs are just far superior to the initial liquid fueled ones. While for commercial operation, the reverse is true, although the hybrid model has been successful for quite a while.
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1. Mostly. Yes, Minotaur is a thing. But those are made from decommissioned ICBMs. Northrup Grumman (nee Orbital ATK) developed an almost completely SRB based rocket for NSSL, but it wasn't competitive.