What's amazing is SpaceX beat companies like Boeing to the punch. That's pretty remarkable!
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SpaceX just won't have the same baggage that bigger outfits do.
The entire aerospace industry has been bureaucratic and hidebound for decades. The story of Lockheed's Skunk Works almost belies the point--they were certainly innovative, but even in the 1960's, the only way they could accomplish it was to get all the best engineers and hide from the bureaucrats long enough to just build shit. Up until the first stealth fighter or so (the F-117) it worked, but it doesn't seem to anymore, considering all the problems, delays, crashes, and other mishaps the F-22 has had.
(Though, to be fair, the F-22 is a much more difficult undertaking. The F-117 had exactly one thing different from any other airplane from the 70's: it was shaped funny. It also had fly-by-wire because it was aerodynamically poor, but the engineering was far more conservative. The F-22 has lots of innovations at once--stealth, supercruise, improved avionics, the whole works--which entails far much more risk. Also, the 117 was a black project, which means there were a couple smart people in the Pentagon approving it and working as their clients, as opposed to the 22 where there were hundreds of Congressmen and thousands of federal bureaucrats to worry about as clients.)
As wikipedia puts it: "Each section was designed by von Braun in Huntsville and built by outside contractors such as Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft, and IBM."
The extreme vertical integration (and pricing model) SpaceX has is what makes it special.
Absolutely. SpaceX is already the cheapest $/kg to orbit. If things play out like Musk intends, they'll cut that number to a tenth of what it is today. There's no way Boeing can compete without a complete restructuring of its space business.
They certainly weren't going to put money into bringing this situation about.
I know one senior JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab -- NASA) engineer who went there early on, and another one who went later to work on docking. Making reliable space launches is a practical skill, and there are a lot of procedures that have been learned over decades that are definitely not textbook material. It has to be picked up in apprenticeship fashion.
In their promotional materials on their www site, they used to say that they were located in Southern CA to take advantage of the large pool of aerospace talent here.