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>successful companies from ground up in fields no one was even looking into.

NASA, ESA, and all the other space agencies might disagree with you here.




I was talking about private space company. I mean who thinks like I'm going to start a private space company that will launch freaking rockets in space. I don't think any private company did that before SpaceX


Like United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, Virgin Orbit, etc?

Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US government decision to fund and develop private spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm and could also source the right technical experts to form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development and launch contract before it had flown anything.

The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and bootstrapped its way to success has always been false. That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a ton of things right and having an impressively bold engineering strategy, of course.


A huge amount of government subsidies does help tremendously at that…





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