Space exploration, sending vehicles to asteroids and meteors, Mars...., did just fine without SpaceX. Maybe SpaceX made the launches for those a tad cheaper, but launch costs are far from the most important cost factor for those missions.

Which leaves rockertry. Reusable rockets are quite an achievement, sure. So far the real world impact is limited to satellite internet, which is not available globally yet.

Starship still has to be launched successfully to count as rocketry advancement.

Launch costs are absolutely an important factor that makes everything space-related extremely expensive. When it costs $1B to launch something, you have to make damn sure you're not launching a dud. That, in turn, makes building the thing even more expensive because you need triple and quadruple redundancies on everything, and everything needs to be tested a bazillion times.

When a launch is "only" $50M, you can get away with much fewer redundancies, less testing making the thing you launch much cheaper.

And yeah, the first large-scale change we've seen from it is vastly better / cheaper satellite internet, but there will be others. Axiom space is a good example; a private company sending astronauts on missions.

There's also the issue that the cheaper something gets, the more potential it has for uses that simply didn't exist before. Take airflight. Imagine planes/flights were about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are today. So many things we take for granted in society would simply no longer exist. Air shipping - gone, trans-Atlantic vacations - gone (or spend a month both ways on a ship), even military air forces would probably no longer exist - kind of weird when a new jet starts costing in the ballpark of an aircraft carrier.

Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back.

And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.

Try to take yourself back to 1960. No human has ever once been in orbit. In fact it was only 3 years ago that we put the first object into orbit. Over the next 2 years we'd finally put a man in orbit. 7 years later we'd be walking on the Moon. A year later - 1970, we had the first spacecraft soft-land on another planet. And the planet it landed on was Venus! [1] The voyager probes would be launched in 1977, and eventually make their way outside the solar system after doing a pinball effect of gravity assists around the solar system.

Where do you see society in 50 years?

That state-of-the-art is still sending rovers to Mars and hoping to achieve a fly-by of the Moon is nothing short of a complete and catastrophic failure in space. People often blame the money, that's not it. The Apollo program, in 2022 dollars, cost about $16 billion a year - starting from absolutely 0 knowledge. NASA's had at least that level of annual funding for the past 60 years. The thing, these great futures we all imagine don't create themselves. Without people, the sort of people who rarely emerge in a society, pushing humanity forward in any given direction, the future isn't going to be any better than the present, and there's every reason to think it may even be worse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_7