NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

Posture, no one can compete, not even NASA.

"Not even" only applies to those that haven't followed the events of the past decade.

1. USA is no longer sponsoring groundbreaking research 2. USA had already begun outsourcing research to companies that are not grounded in long term employment of researchers.

In general, yes, but in this specific instance, groundbreaking research or its lack isn't the core of the problem.

This is mostly about the new human-rated lander, which is an engineering problem. Notably, the US never had a reasonably safe spaceship, although Dragon may yet prove good. Both Apollos and Space Shuttles, developed under NASA, were pretty dangerous to their crews.

As evident in Challenger and Columbia…

You’re absolutely right. Astronauts sign a last will and testament before every flight. We think it’s routine because we’ve nailed down orbital science but in reality, we lack the quality assurance that space flight demands. It’s one thing to send up robots and satellites, it’s another to send up humans. The ISS is crawling with bacteria. We lack the physical protection for long space travel for a mars mission much less visiting anything past the Kuiper belt.