> There isn't enough history yet to compare them fairly.
I compare them on what they provide for what cost right now, and the kind of company that they appear to be building as of now. Hopefully it was clear that I wasn't making predictions about the future.
If you think Spacex isn't in bed with the US military, and won't be increasingly so in future for the usual reasons, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.
I haven't seen much indication that their business model relies on lobbying for war or pushing for gargantuan "aid" into unstable regions which may only be used for buying weapons, or buying politicians and generals so they can sell sub standard and over priced projects.
Maybe SpaceX does, maybe it will. But providing launch services to the military and undercutting the companies that definitely do those things is not a problem to me. This wasn't a military = bad rant.
Yes, that is how they fund their operations. No one else is giving out billions of dollars to build rockets.
At the same time they are using that money to
1. Create full reusabilty.
2. Drop launch costs 10 to 100 fold.
3. Massively increase payload and launch capability.
Which is the point of this particular thread. The other launch groups have pocketed (hundreds of) billions of dollars and changed almost nothing over the past few decades.
It isn't.
> There isn't enough history yet to compare them fairly.
I compare them on what they provide for what cost right now, and the kind of company that they appear to be building as of now. Hopefully it was clear that I wasn't making predictions about the future.