I love Gwynne as much as the next guy and she it clearly, but the team is lead by Elon. Gwynne helps keep the company running, makes the deals and has relations with DoD and NASA, makes sure nothing gets missed and so on. Flat out, Musk is the leader, he says what development happens, when and how. He decides how much money is spent and so on. Gwynne has said as much as well.
It seem like people love to use Gwynne to say 'SpaceX is successful despite Musk', you didn't quite go so far, bu t still. This line of reasoning just doesn't work.
If Starship is successful, many people will be able to afford to go to space.
Not so! See Delta Clipper ca. 1996: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z46RiuZvh6c
The SpaceX advancement may be more business than tech. They have a way to thrive without pork contracts paying them to build a new launcher every mission. The fat, complacent, dinosaurs will have trouble dieting down to parity.
In fact, maybe that's why Delta Clipper didn't advance to the next stage: not enough fat milk for contractors!
Propulsive landing has existed as long as the space industry of course.
> The SpaceX advancement may be more business than tech.
No it really isn't. This is sort of myth people perpetuate because they don't like SpaceX. Fact is, SpaceX did a huge amount of development to actually achieve a really reusable first stage.
Early on data was flowing from NASA to SpaceX, but pretty quickly it was NASA monitoring SpaceX and asking them for data because they simply don't have it. SpaceX had to figure out things like supersonic retropropulsion. The engine SpaceX development achieved things nobody has done before.
People point to a few research projects that thought about some individual things SpaceX did, but those never came even close even as a sum of all of them.
While Elon is...eccentric...he managed to assemble the team led by Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX which can accomplish massive amounts in very short periods of time. Their success rate is extremely high so I would hesitate to ever bet against them.
Blue Origin has for a long time been a side-thing for Jeff. As a result, it apparently suffers from a serious lack of focus, commitment and sheer f'ing will. This is not a judgement of the front-line employees, but of the leadership which has let them all down.
Boeing is...well, Boeing.
I want to go into space as well. And I'm actually much more optimistic than you about the price and accessibility. At our current rate of change, it'll not just be possible within our lifetimes - it'll be commonplace.
Why? Take the example of landing first stage boosters. This was something that had never been successfully done. SpaceX started working on landing in 2013 and successfully did it in 2016. Since then it has become commonplace - sticking the landing isn't even newsworthy. Each tipping point, such as reusability, is happening faster and faster.