Not only did SpaceX make breakthroughs considered impossible by the "experts" in the industry, they did it by hiring a guy who literally built rocket engines in his garage to design the engines. The key here is personality. And the type of person who actually wants to build things and get things done absolutely recoils at bureaucracy and the type of people who like it.
When you build something to the point where there is a bureaucratic "establishment" in control you can be sure that innovation slows to a crawl. You may still have a few individual scientists doing great work, but you can be sure that some miserable bureaucrat will pat him on the back and stick it in a drawer somewhere never to see the light of day again. The same is true whether that bureaucratic establishment is at a government or in universities, or any other type of bureaucratic organization.
"Building things" is not science, it's engineering. We could certainly compare the outcomes of "bureaucratic" science against the free market variety, but there's basically no free market science going on to support such a comparison.
This isn't a value judgement. Engineering is just as important as science, but just as more science is not a replacement for engineering, neither does better engineering free us from the need to keep pursuing science. And at the end of the day, SpaceX might be an impressive engineering company, but we still need the scientists. And it's weird how often the success of SpaceX is brought up as an implicit argument that we can send all the scientists to work on farms or whatever without any ill effects.
It also seems notable that a company like SpaceX is an obvious candidate to bring back the 20th century style corporate funded scientific research organizations to underpin their engineering efforts in a way that would presumably be free of the hated "bureaucracy". But if they've done so, I haven't heard about it.
Any American company could use NASA's designs for reusable rockets... Oh wait, only SpaceX did it. And 10 years after they did it, they're still the only company that did it (not counting New Shepard of course, as it can't put anything into orbit). Are some congressmen forbidding other companies to use their own money to make better rockets?
Lol. SpaceX wasn't the first private company to develop a reusable rocket. It was just the first one owned by a billionaire that convince other people to fund it.
SpaceX is notorious in the aeronautical industry for attempting to interfere in the research and funding of other companies. Over a decade ago a competitor had viable plans for a 2 stage rocket... until Musk sued to block the funding.
If by funded you mean SpaceX received hundreds of millions in government funding, then yes he funded it himself.... the same way he built Dragon all by himself...
That's how most space launch companies work, they get government contracts to do things for government. ULA (joint venture of Lockheed & Boeing) gets nearly all of its revenue from the government. Musk funded SpaceX until they made enough progress to have NASA consider them worthy of getting a contract for resupplying ISS (and they got other commercial customers).
> SpaceX wasn't the first private company to develop a reusable rocket.
It surely was the first to actually make a reusable orbital rocket.
> It was just the first one owned by a billionaire that convince other people to fund it.
Elon Musk became a billionaire in 2012, when they were already working on reusability. They didn't even need that much money to develop it, they mostly experimented with it on operational flights for their customers. Anyway, companies in the industry could also assign/obtain funds to do it, but they chose not to (until Blue Origin and the current wave of space startups).
> SpaceX is notorious in the aeronautical industry for attempting to interfere in the research and funding of other companies. Over a decade ago a competitor had viable plans for a 2 stage rocket... until Musk sued to block the funding.
When you build something to the point where there is a bureaucratic "establishment" in control you can be sure that innovation slows to a crawl. You may still have a few individual scientists doing great work, but you can be sure that some miserable bureaucrat will pat him on the back and stick it in a drawer somewhere never to see the light of day again. The same is true whether that bureaucratic establishment is at a government or in universities, or any other type of bureaucratic organization.