Given the huge investments NASA has made in SpaceX to date, I'm not entirely convinced that the split between public and private money in this space is as black and white as you suggest.

SpaceX arguably wouldn't be here today without NASA's cash.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-w...

Sounds a bit like the story of how Microsoft saved Apple, back in 1997.

https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech_0806/

NASA paid $1.6b and got 12 flights to the ISS for it. Rather cheap in my book. I'm not aware of any other "huge investments" ... there were some smaller ones, however.

Looks like both NASA and SpaceX got a good deal.

Oh wow. That's disappointing.

Why is that disappointing?

NASA today exists, in part, to do exactly that, and has benefitted tremendously from their SpaceX partnership.

Just thought SpaceX had other revenue sources, I guess.

They do?

http://www.spacex.com/missions

About half the missions on there are non-US government flights.

A not insignificant amount of SpaceX's funding (especially considering the critical time of that funding) is from NASA. They are also leveraging decades of NASA research in their engine and rocket design.

I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, and think they (and other like them) represent the future, but they have a little ways to go before they are completely financing their own R&D (at the moment they're still spending a lot of public dollars).

Considering how little impact they've had recently with a $19 billion dollar annual budget, maybe what we're seeing is an administrative or leadership problem. It would suck for those involved if NASA got severe cuts, but in the long run the geniuses there would find jobs in the private sector like SpaceX and they could make a real difference.

Just for reference, here is the list of NASA science missions now flying: https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=Al...

The private sector would have no incentive and little ability to mount these missions.