This is hardly a charitable interpretation. The lack of competition provides for little incentive for improvement. Now, for prisons, I think for-profit prisons are quite problematic because the incentives are abjectly antithetical to justice.
> We have a national space agency that has had plenty of time and money to do the stuff SpaceX is doing.
That's quite inaccurate. NASA doesn't do much themselves, they hire external contractors but keep significant control over them. SpaceX got more funding and less control and they didn't start from scratch, NASA gave them all of their technical documentation, now-how and working prototypes.
NASA could have done everything SpaceX does if they were given the same conditions and funding, however, they've never had funding for blowing up five spaceships in row, they were held to much stricter standards.
The entire story looks like a blatant attempt to take control of space operations away from NASA and thus from the government.
how do explain other governments funding efforts to copy spacex without success, its easy to hand wave away peoples efforts and achievements with hindsight
>NASA could have done everything SpaceX does if they were given the same conditions and funding
This may have been hypothetically possible, as are many things that never came to be, but it is impossible to know whether this really would have happened.
enjoy the snap reaction brain drain as entrepreneurs move their efforts offshore, people are being disingenuous by saying its as simple as deciding to nationalise a company everyone said would fail and who china and Europe are desperately trying to emulate, all over retaliatory statements, be careful what sort of government behaviour you normalise because you happen to be on the winning side of that behaviour, seasons change
onlyrealcuzzo above commented that Trump canceling SpaceX contracts would be "literally the path that led the USSR to ruin".
However, we have a case of a private contractor trying to manipulate the president by means of "revelations" and decommissioning of a service important for national security. If the president cannot change those contracts the US would be literally on the path to oligarchic Russia... I'm not sure what's worse.
Trump is generally moving in the direction of reducing government control of corporations to the point of risking government capture by oligarchic interests. What's happening now is a direct consequence of his policies and it's ironic that Trump's powers are being questioned when it comes to corporate regulation.
Trump's personal faults are irrelevant at the moment, if the GOP doesn't stand firmly behind Trump we are going to find ourselves in an incredible mess.