Robert,
Thank you for that informative reply. I was hoping you or someone would be able to confiim my original impressions of the private space industry. Not that there isn’t a place for NASA, but my hope is that private industry will ultimately be the innovator and vanguard. When will SpaceX go public?
Jim

Jim,

You should know that:

1. SpaceX did and continues to invest its own money in Dragon/Falcon 9. NASA’s money is essentially a subsidy.
2. SpaceX owns the technologies, not NASA.

These two points, especially the second, are what make this approach so different from every other past NASA effort to build a replacement to the shuttle.

Nonetheless, it would preferable if the government didn’t subsidize these companies, but merely bought their product like any other customer.

One final point: Unlike Solyndra, where the CEO was a big fund-raiser and contributor to the Obama campaign, Elon Musk has not been a campaign contributor, as far as I know. (If he has, the sums have been inconsequential.) Moreover, unlike Solyndra, where gigantic sums of government money were given to a company before it had achieved anything, SpaceX has gotten its NASA subsidies as a reward for actual achievement. There is a difference between the two.