But the reality is that competition really does drive innovation.

In the past few years we've seen SpaceX get reusable boosters working, a mission to the ISS, etc. Though people like to diminish blue origin's accomplishments due to not hitting orbit they were able to land their reusable booster on the first try too.

In a short amount of time we've seen tremendous progress in bringing down the costs of launching. It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same.

I have a few friends that have spent years at JPL and the amount of bureaucracy, waste, and red tape they had to deal with all went away when they started working at SpaceX and then Blue Origin.

The fundamental problem is that NASA's funding is tied to politics and not a business model. Both Democrats and Republicans gutted NASA over the last 15 years and essentially killed any chance we had at even launching basic rockets. The SLS was the last serious project NASA tackled and it was shuttered.

Private space exploration has brought us innovation at a pace NASA could have never delivered because it always had to be pessimistic and scared of funding cuts if anything ever failed.

SpaceX raised about 6 billion in total, NASAs budget is 23 Billion/Year -- why did NASA lose the ability to get people to space?

You can blame whatever you want, but at the end of the day - they're failing.

Didn't they just land a robot on mars? Maybe they aren't failing but have different priorities. People marvel that SpaceX docks with the ISS but the existence of the ISS and the people on it is taken for granted at this point. How did they get there before SpaceX?

Space Shuttle and then Soyuz.

>It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same.

It's only inconceivable because we refuse to fully fund NASA.

NASA has so many entrenched issues from being a primarily political organization. even if you fully funded them, I wouldn’t expect the level of innovation as elsewhere.

You would be surprised to learn that history is littered with examples of the fickle preferences of one person impacting the trajectory of the human species.

Also I'm curious why you think that a government is better suited at spending money. From what I've seen this leads to lobbyists doing all they can to curry favor and secure contracts despite the fact that they deliver a sub-par product.

Lobbyists are paid for by private businesses, to win contracts which will be poorly performed by privately owned contractors.

OTOH the US Government, with programs run by publicly paid employees: went to the moon, built a ton of dams, including the Hoover and Grand Coulee, electrified the Tennessee Valley, built the interstate highway system, etc.

Can you come up with any projects the US government has done successfully in the last 50 years though?

The internet?

The Affordable Care Act website, despite the initial difficulties, is a pretty impressive feat. That said, the issue for me is that people parrot Reaganisms blaming the government, without stopping to consider cause and effect or history. The US Government was intentionally stripped of it's capabilities so private sector oligarchs could gorge off the public dole, and that's where we are at today. The solution is to rebuild those capabilities, not to surrender completely.

"Great Man history" is a troublesome way to interpret the past and neglects many other forces that shape our society and planet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

Ignoring the influence one person can have is equally troublesome.

Suppose Constantine never converted to Christianity. Suppose Genghis Khan had been injured before conquering Asia. Suppose Louis the XVI had reformed the French government. Sure some other ruler would probably have embraced Christianity or some other ruler would have conquered Asia but history is fundamentally a sequence of events and minor changes, like a strong ruler in one place or another, can have massive downstream impacts.

>Suppose Constantine never converted to Christianity

What about the changes in wider Roman society that allowed for Constantine's conversion to have a large impact?

>Suppose Louis the XVI had reformed the French government.

Would those reforms have been carried out by the nobility? Would it have been enough to satisfy the peasants?

Focusing on "great men" is a far too simplistic view of history and it ignores the impact that each of us have on history as individuals.

"Great men" create Focal Points[0] (or, if you believe in great men, Schelling Points) around which societies and lines of history converge. It's probably equally true, though, to say that societal dynamics have within them focal points which allow certain men (and women) to become great.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29

Guess what? The government has decided that NASA isn't important. If they're taxed more, that doesn't magically send money to NASA.

The government has had first dibs on space for a very long time, and they've done nothing with it. Talk about taxing billionaires until you're blue in the face - whether you do or not has no effect on NASA. There's plenty of money to put towards it now, and it's not a priority.

I'm glad that billionaires are taking up an important cause for the future of our species when our government is failing to do so.

NASA is still doing the hard/interesting stuff, but now that there is a market that can more cheaply/rapidly work on creating the rockets/vehicles to get payloads where they need to go they can focus more on the actual missions.

Likewise, NASA has always chosen "buy" over "build" where applicable (like contracting out spacesuit construction to major textile manufacturers). If they'd done everything in-house, that means fewer resources where it matters. Public-private partnerships make NASA more effective, not less.