[kibwen]

The space shuttle isn't relevant to this conversation. Private industry has been putting things in space for decades, long before SpaceX existed. The reason no private company put a thing on the moon isn't because they couldn't, it was because nobody was paying them to, and because there is not otherwise any economic benefit to them for doing so. If your expected income is zero, it doesn't matter how low your costs are.

[somenameforme]

I agree that Space Shuttle is not relevant (as a peer poster mentioned it simply lacks the delta v to even get to the Moon), but do not agree that this capability has readily existed for decades. You needed (1) private industry (2) affordable (3) moon capable and (4) civilian availability. We were failing on various points at various times, but now a days none of those really pose an issue anymore.

Now that we've clearly nailed all 4 of those points, we're starting to see lots more interesting things in space from tourists visiting the ISS, people sending their ashes to space, to doing private space walks and going further into space than any human has since the 70s [1], and now even things like this with a private company landing a payload on the Moon. Many of these things are done with no return beyond doing them.

More specifically though, this is also literally why SpaceX was created. Elon was researching NASA's plans for getting men to Mars. They literally did not exist. He wanted to get society more interested in space and so his idea was to launch a greenhouse to Mars and live-stream it. The capability for that simply did not exist in America, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_Dawn