They're creating plenty, no doubt, but Musk talks admiringly of Apollo and how valuable the experimentation and open designs of that era have been for SpaceX. It allowed them to focus on a much smaller design space.

Unfortunately, I can't find a good source for it (I remember reading an interview with Musk where he talked about it). I think everyone recognizes that they are standing on the shoulders of giants and says so frequently.

Interestingly, the Soyuz and Apollo programs, although their missions were similar, differed significantly in engineering culture. I heard a story about the Soyuz-NASA collaboration that lead up to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz_Test_Proje...): NASA engineers met with Soyuz engineers and asked for engineering specifications, but the Soyuz engineers couldn't give them (or maybe they just weren't very detailed) because most things were in people's heads rather than documented. The Russians were iterative and practical, and had very robust systems, but they were not nearly as formal as the NASA blokes.

In the end, I wonder if that lack of careful documentation on Soyuz' part diminished its long-term helpfulness? Or did they later record their designs more carefully? I would be curious to know. Apollo documents are apparently available for aspiring rocket builders. Hurray for openness in publicly funded research.

Or maybe they just needed an excuse for not giving those specs.

Let's hope they land humans on the Moon and Mars in the next 13 years. Elon has much more capital now than back in 2002. They are the most likely company to settle space.

SpaceX has the lowest costs of any launch provider, and within about 2 years they will have the greatest capabilities in launch vehicles with the addition of the Falcon Heavy. That combination has already allowed them to gain an impressive amount of launch contracts, fulfilling those contracts successfully ought to cement them as the most favored launch provider in the world. And the combination of low internal costs and high volume will likely translate into a profit windfall of the sort that we are more accustomed to seeing from dot coms. Based on every indication they will use that windfall to finance R&D on even more audacious plans such as super heavy lift rockets and the colonization of Mars.