The thing about the rockets is this: If they (the government) already had the technology, why would they just gave it to him? Why him? How would they get the technology? They would have paid companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to develop it. How else would they get it? It's not like NASA developed it. NASA is just a government bureaucracy for farming out development contracts to private industry. If Boeing or Lockheed Martin actually developed the technology, they would have it now. Those guys pay more in lobbying fees than SpaceX spent to develop the technology. They wouldn't just lay back and let it be taken away from them. They would have people killed to stop that.
SpaceX has the most advanced rocket technology on the planet. They can reuse their launch vehicles while everybody else has to throw the launch vehicle away after one use. They've perfected their first generation capability, and are now developing the next generation capability using the same approach that worked already. SpaceX started developing the reusable first stages about 15 years ago, and obviously made steady progress through that time, but nobody else has even started on this in any serious way.
SpaceX has launched 80% of all global mass to orbit in 2023, and is on track to launch 90% in 2024. SpaceX is hitting this level of monopoly because reusable boosters cost a fraction of the old fashioned throw away kind. Why haven't Boeing, or Lockheed Martin, or the European Space Agency, or Russia, or China even started on this? They are totally unable to do so. SpaceX is just that far ahead of the rest.
It doesn't make any sense to say that SpaceX was given this technology. It only makes sense to think that the incremental development that has been carried out publicly has led them to their current capability, and that they really are first in the world.
It's not so unusual. Industrialist entrepreneurs have been leading companies to a world class technological capability in one field or another since the start of the industrial revolution. This is just the latest. It won't last forever, but it's not reasonable to deny the achievement.
And, it also goes to show, at least at some level, there is ultimately accountability to the tax payer. Lockheed Martin and the other space companies are not much different than space X, they just did the bidding and developed the technology at the bequest of the gov't vs Elon going it alone with private money. Of course when you pay the piper you call the tune, so Elon's design can be said to be a lot more independent of gov't overreach. It's one thing to be given a billion dollars and then told to make a space ship, it's quite another to get a billion dollars of your own money and decide to bring a rocket to market.
Anyways, prior to space X commercial launches, the other guys had a pretty sweet gravy train. No bid, cost plus contracts, lobbying, and to even get a seat to bid you had to be in their special club, then Elon comes along and can do what they can at 10% of the cost? I'm surprised these big defence contractors didn't put out a hit on him.
It was one of the early "screw yous" to the big established military industrial complex who sucked at the tit of tax payers with zero accountability, oversight, or efficiency. This was one of the few times where it was so obviously much better and cheaper that they couldn't help but go with him.
That's what I think it's all about. Doing things better, more efficiently, more honestly. I'm for free speech and free discourse. I don't dislike Disney because they have different values, but because they want you to as well, and censor as much as the existence of alternative view points. I just don't get this mindset of everyone who advances the right's/red pill causes is ultimately a shill. What's your example of someone who isn't then? Everyone out side of the absolute fringe is either opposition if they disagree with you, or controlled opposition if they don't? Where does that get you? You see it everywhere. JBP, Gad Saad, Joe Rogan, anyone with mainstream enough views to be taken in by the masses, but get them asking questions is off the table. So who isn't? Change comes gradual. In 1950 a rumour that you went to a communist rally 20 years ago could have been as much a career ending move. Who would have imagined we'd have gone from that to where a video of you taking a rainbow sticker off your car could similarly get you fired? That took over half a century.
A far, far better life view I feel is to give people the benefit of the doubt. No one is perfect, and everyone has flaws - even within the like mindedness collective here. Until you have very solid reasons otherwise (he made a random symbol while holding his hands together, or his birth year divided by 3 + 9 is 666. And 9-3 = 6. ) I absolutely give him the benefit of the doubt. What's the alternative? Rally behind no ones who are so far outside of the acceptable views these days that even the most welcoming places wont platform them? Like the theory of global warming, the more accommodations, exceptions, and inconsistencies a theory has, the worse a theory it is. "He just told, on a major legacy media platform, one of the biggest companies CEOs championing the woke to F-off" "Yah but he did that thing with his hands 7 years ago once!"
