When an entire fucking conglomerate including a substantial portion of the military industrial complex loses to a lone man, the problem isn't the lone man.
The only change right now is that NASA is no longer the only party designing missions, because entities such as SpaceX have enough integrated expertise to run their own show start to finish.
It's also the most successful space program in the world, so what's the benchmark we're comparing it to? The failings of the US space program had relatively little to do with private contractors, and a lot to do with politics and the voting public not liking risk.
Boeing has already openly stated that they won't bid on fixed price contracts anymore, and lately we have all sorts of other damning information like how repairs for the ground support systems for SLS are running so late they might cause Artemis 2 to be delayed further, while SpaceX effectively nuked their launch pad last year and was ready to fly, with upgrades, just 6 months later.
Musk began SpaceX with $100 million of his own cash, almost his entire wealth from having been the majority owner of PayPal when eBay bought it; lots for you and me, but not so compared to the budgets of the Boeings and Airbuses of the world. He and it certainly didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon and Dragon, and both came very close to bankruptcy early on. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars.
In any case, infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. He founded Blue Origin, his own rocket company, before Musk founded SpaceX, but Blue Origin has yet to send a single rocket to orbit. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
Is there any world where any western government created reusable rockets by 2025 without space x? No chance.
And should we talk about the enormous dysfunction of NASA? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a...
This isn't because their best engineers get hired by space x, it's because the system is set up to fail and there's absolutely no accountability.
Are there some well-functioning organizations? Sure. Would they have been able to accomplish anything remotely close in cost, speed, or safety of space x? No.
NASA has involved the private sector for over half a century. Taking that out of the equation leaves you with SpaceX absolutely killing it and Boeing bumbling along despite getting bigger contracts from the government, so it's hard for me to draw this same conclusion.
> a benefactor with unbelievable wealth being able to hoard the best engineers
Hmm.. the implication here doesn't ring true at all. "Oh how I wish I could work at Boeing where all the real innovation happens, but here I am stuck at SpaceX due to these darn golden handcuffs". I hope SpaceX people get paid a lot, but I suspect the draw for most is what they are doing and the speed at which they are doing it.
Part of the reason NASA was so doubtful of SpaceX at first was that they had previously heavily supported other space startups, only for them to fail to deliver.
Arguing that SpaceX is hoarding all the talent is also funny when considering that many other space startups are by ex-SpaceX employees, and SpaceX is often described as having a high churn rate.
> SpaceX is a perfect storm of a benefactor with unbelievable wealth
This is nonsense. Musk is rich BECAUSE OF SPACEX (and Tesla). When SpaceX was created Musk 'only' had 100 million $ and all of that was invested in SpaceX. After that, Musk never again put money in the company.
If you look into the history of this, you will see many other people with that much money that failed to get anywhere.
SpaceX is successful because they successfully executed on contracts and found many costumers.
> hoard the best engineers money can buy.
This is another completely made up statement. SpaceX did not go after the best established engineers. In fact SpaceX became famous for giving incredibly amount of responsibility to underpaid junior engineers.
Are you just making up stuff because you don't like SpaceX?
> And now the advancements they've made are proprietary.
And how much money does NASA save by using non-proprietary technologies? If they cost 10-100x more, what's the benefit of NASA owning things?
> Ideally Boeing and SpaceX could just collaborate and not have fight each other and waste a load of time and money.
Why would SpaceX collaborate with Boeing? SpaceX doesn't need anything from Boeing.
If NASA would have wanted to save money, they could have only given the Crew contract to SpaceX. This was unlikely, more likely would have been giving the contract to only Boeing.
Many large cooperation working together has a long history of not working. Consider the cost of SLS for example. Or the Orion. What bases of data do you take into account here that suggest NASA would have saved money if they had forced SpaceX to work with Boeing?
But NASA considered that it was actually cheaper to give two fixed price contracts rather then a single cost plus contract. And it seems to have worked for NASA.
> If the point is an open, competitive field driving space exploration forward, it seems we don't have that.
And yet the US has the most competitive most active space flight industry in the world. China and Europe would kill to have even 1/10 the amount of success.
So what are you basing your statement on?
> They caught lightning in a bottle and it may never happen again.
Sure but doing it the old way you all but guarantee that its not gone happen again.
In terms of engineering success, SpaceX didn't have some magical pill. Suggesting that these new processes could result in other successful companies. The recent successful moon lander in the CLIPS program is at least amazing as the Falcon 1 was.
> My hypothesis is there isn't room or capacity for more competition.
We have to differentiate the markets. Are you talking about human space flight only? Then you might be right in the short term. But NASA can at least guarantee flights if somebody else invests in it.
In other markets much more competition exists.