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.
Oh wait..they did...
Because NASA thought reusable rockets were possible decades ago. The reason they never built them was because certain Congressmen blocked the funding.