SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy OFT-2 Launch Authorized

Well to be fair, there’s a lot of technology at spacex no one else has. One example, the Raptor engine’s combination of size, efficiency, and thrust is just not available to anyone other than SpaceX. Even if exact schematics were stolen you’d still need to obtain the recipes for the alloys used and how to manufacture them. Companies gave up on full flow staged combustion as just not feasible but SpaceX figured it out and is on v3 of perfecting it.

I think most other organizations have a lot more bureaucracy involved in making changes, which makes them slower and more expensive.

Plus, SpaceX doesn't try to spread out its operations across the US to act like a jobs program, while the other big space contractors have advertised their presence in every state as a reason they should be picked, which obviously increases costs.

So when someone comes along that optimizes on cost and velocity and eschews cost plus contracts, that can be very difficult to deal with.

Also, as other people have mentioned, they pretty clearly do have exceptional tech - they routinely land orbital class boosters which has only been done with prototype rockets (it's very different landing when you can hover vs when you can't). And Raptor and Merlin are among the best rocket engines that have ever been made.

And even more impressive than specific components is their production and operational expertise. Being able to launch so many rockets flawlessly is a truly astounding feat. In a couple of years, Falcon 9 might even beat out the RD-108/107's total accumulated flight time record, which I thought wouldn't happen for a very long time.

Edit: for context, the RD-108/107 are the engines used on the Soyuz, which (as a family) has a truly astounding number of flights. To be fair to SpaceX, though, Soyuz accumulated those over many decades.

Hell, he got in trouble for false statements about Tesla, which is publicly held.

They also need to launch more satellites to increase capacity and add most customers. The big question is how many potential customers are out there, and if they will be enough to maintain the network.

That depends on your design and if you need experimentally derived inputs

When half your components have decades of reliability under their belt of course it’s easier to have a successful first launch.

If your development methodology results in a product that is unsustainable to launch due to costs and scalability, that absolutely seems relevant to whether that methodology was successful.

SLS is going to be tossing four RS-25 engines per launch (with *each* engine costing the same as ~2-3 entire Falcon 9 launches) into the ocean as the planned course of action. That is by design - and not some accident during a test flight.