However, reduction of taxes and government intervention is a common talking point in internal politics. All things considered, the US has done a better job than, let's say, Europe and Asia in keeping the government out of economic affairs. No sane American libertarian would say, though, that the government has been successful at being "lean with minimum taxes", however it's doing better than most other major countries.

Having lived abroad and personally knowing many people living across the world, I can say that keeping taxes "low-ish" and the market "free-ish" is rarely a topic of conversation in the mainstream political debate outside the US.

It's true that in europe lower taxes are not a topic. Nobody really expects to pay less taxes. They expect better services and guarantees.

[Citation needed]

The only support NASA has given SpaceX for Starship is the HLS contract[1]. And that is a firm, fixed-price milestone based contract. NASA doesn't pay for any failures there.

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1. Technically not true - there is a very minor fuel transfer demonstration contract. But that, too, only pays out on success.

It is nice that there are other players around this space (Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, etc...), but all of them are currently aiming at much smaller payloads (than Falcon 9), or sub-orbital payloads. Those are different spaces.

Of SpaceX's future competitors, almost all of them are aiming at larger payloads than Falcon 9.

* Vulcan: larger or smaller depending on how many SRBs

* New Glenn: larger

* Terran R: larger

* Neutron: smaller

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...

The government is paying half. And that only for the specialized Moon Lander version. And it requires SpaceX to do a whole lot of things to.

Government pay nothing for the infrastructure SpaceX developed, for the Raptor engine they have developed over the last decade and so on.

This 80% number is complete nonsense.

If you want to make grand statements, at least do a minimal amount of research.

Edit: And in case you are talking about Falcon 9 the claim is even more wrong.

> Michael Griffin. Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors. He felt the amount of government funding was "excessive in his view" compared with what he originally envisioned for the commercial space program.

From SpaceX's Wikipedia page. The Falcon 1 which was expandable, nothing special and cost ~$100 million was privately funded, the rest relied on very generous subsidies. (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies)

On the contrary, outlandish and expensive (like aerospace) moonshot bets with uncertain financial benefits often happen due to government help, even in times of "unlimited money" which are far from the norm. For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies; Airbus, the by far best civilian airplane manufacturer today, only exists because of European government pressure and funding. Bombardier only managed to design the C-series with Canadian government funds. All recent developments in renewables were off the back of massive subsidies for their adoption.

Spacex didn’t get money handed to them (unlike the corn and oil industries). It got orders to complete certain tasks that NASA thought it might do better than itself. Boeing and many others got these types of orders too. It explains nothing about why spacex succeeded.

This “Elon did spacex thanks to government” is a serious misrepresentation of what happened, and if it was true, why is the government funded EU space program struggling so much?

According to the WTO, those are overgenerous and the same as subsidies (check Airbus' cases against Boeing for illegal subsidies).

> It explains nothing about why spacex succeeded

Indeed, just money (even government money) is not sufficient. Never said it was, only that it is a flat out lie to say only private funding can innovate and that SpaceX/Tesla did it all on their own and Musk is a self-made man/billionaire.

SpaceX offers payloads to space at an order of magnitude lower price than its competitors.

Infinity times cheaper in the case of the CRS contract, where the competitor has to date delivered 0 kg of human mass to space

Interesting that you have to point to Boeing because no such case exists for SpaceX.

And all of those contracts for SpaceX were cheaper then what Arianespace could have offered, or any US competitor.

You are just parating lies that ArianeGroup has been spouting for a decade because they have no technical way to compete. Its literally just false propaganda.

The reality is ArianeGroup has and had subsidies far, far, far larger then what SpaceX had. The total cost of the original Falcon 9 was maybe 400M and maybe 300M of that was part of the governments program to get private supply for ISS (that the Europeans handed over to the US and SpaceX to do because they couldn't do it cheaply).

In comparison Ariane 6 is costing the government 4 billion $ minimum, likely more.

If anybody has grounds to complain with the WTO its SpaceX.

Also being in a position of 'up-and-comer' you definitely don't want to stay behind

But that being said, being reusable is great, but not a "be all, end all" objective. Sure, it can make launches cheaper, but not even Falcon 9 is reusable if they need to get to higher orbits (I believe the last F9H launch was fully expended)

Nothing special just the first privately funded rocket to make it to orbit. The first new rocket engine developed in the US for decades.

> (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies)

Musk has always acknowledged and publicly called out for the COTS contracts as being incredibly important and even saving SpaceX.

> For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies

Both of those are wrong. Tesla was almost 10 years in before they received a public loan, and the accepted it because it was a slightly better deal then they could have gotten privately but they had other funding options.

SpaceX Falcon 1 didn't happen because of the government. The governments contract did accelerate the Falcon 9 project however.

That would be Pegasus in 1990, though.

> The first new rocket engine developed in the US for decades.

There were plenty of engines developed in the US in that timeframe. Merlin in particular was a "spiritual successor" of the Fastrac, and Kestrel was implemented by the former Beal Aerospace engineers who worked on BA-2 before being hired by SpaceX.

(It's launched from underneath an airplane.)

Fair point.

> There were plenty of engines developed in the US in that timeframe.

Engines that actually flew or at least fully finished development. As far as I know there are none.