More generally, no private company would be able to fund fundamental research and turn a profit. Apple used DARPA tech to make the iphone, Pfizer used decades of public research on mRNA to make the covid vaccine and SpaceX uses NASA's engineering expertise to get its rockets to orbit.
Also, SpaceX gets billions of dollars from the US government annually.
I have to imagine you mean turn a profit directly on the research itself (isolated down to the cost per specific item of research).
Because obviously big tech can quite trivially fund fundamental research at an enormous scale as they see fit while printing their traditional gigantic profits.
Apple + Microsoft + Facebook + Amazon + Nvidia + Google = over half a trillion dollars in annual operating income (around $126 billion in op income last quarter).
They could fund NASA (~$25 billion) and would never really notice it. It'd take about four to six months of further op income growth by those six companies and NASA's budget would be covered in perpetuity.
They could fund current NASA, but they won't fund what NASA should be.
They rely on publicly funded labs to make the real innovations and do the last (but nonetheless important) mile of bringing it to the public.
Why are they designing rockets then? Has very little to do with science.
Nobody denies that NASA should 'lose' money you are literally arguing a straw man. The question is 'what should NASA spend its money on'. And wasting 80+ billion $ on a completely broken architecture that makes no sense what so ever seem to most people like a bad idea.
People actually WANT NASA to actually do more science, and actually advanced tech development.
Personally I think NASA should be building things like nuclear reactors for space, or mars, moon missions. They should work on super-advanced engines. On chemical systems to make water on Mars. There are lots of things NASA could do that there simply isn't another way to do it.
What NASA should be doing is reinvesting in 70s technology that is completely useless and out-dated for purely political reasons.
I don't fucking understand why everybody who criticizes NASA is attacked with 'you hate science' when this is not actually what people are complaining about. Its just kneejerk defense of all that is wrong with NASA and congress.