[0xfaded]

The missing part here is that there needs to be enough money to be made to offset the risk and startup costs to justify upfront investment.

The last decades have been dominated by tech giants building mostly software, and this has set the bar for risk/expectations when ideas are competing for dollars.

It is not at all obvious to me that a hugely expensive and insanely high risk venture such as putting humans on the moon would magically materialize as a product of a hypothetical free market in today's world.

Moonshots require risks and rewards shared by larger society. It would be impossible, for example, for NASA to capture the complete value of technology developed to go to the moon. However, the body of knowledge filtering out into society at large justifies NASAs continued funding (that and jobs in key states /s).

It would be hard to justify that SpaceX was a rational business venture without hindsight. And many emoyees who work for SpaceX are known to have made economic tradeoffs. There is definitely something beyond "free market" to the story.