Because the capitalist west doesn't have strategic view, beside maybe on the defense sector.
Everything else must produce profits next quarter not in the next 3 years.
It's this. Wall Street won't allow american companies to make long term decisions and long term planning that cost money in the short term, because they want all that money immediately now. Like, right now now. If an executive promised they could deliver big profits in 5 years by spending the next two investing their profits, Wall Street would fire them and put in someone who will happily spend all the profit (plus debt) to do stock buybacks and dividend disbursals.
Indeed, if these are loss making operations, who puts the capital for those rockets to get off the ground? and why are they putting their capital in this when instead they could have a "nice ETF bringing 10% yearly"?
Both those companies only can exist because of massive amounts of corporate welfare. What exactly are you trying to argue here? That the government should give private capital more of the people's money while the country suffers from lack of healthcare, childcare, education, and housing?
The point I'm trying to make is that there are also investors that are long on an investment and willing take losses for a long time before the big pay off materialises, or not. But that's private equity investment rather than stock market logic. Capitalism can also be about the mid-long term profits, given the proper opportunity.
Musk did not go it alone in the SpaceX venture, he obviously had other investors joining in on the risks and potential losses.
As for the government giving private capital public funds, no, that's obviously not what i'm arguing for, even though that's pretty much how the US has been running since WW2. The military industrial complex did not rise up as a normal capitalistic venture.
I am as appalled as anyone by the divestments in healthcare, education and such in the US, but the moral underpinnings and fundaments of the United States and its history, the puritanical element in particular, lead me to think that this is going to remain a long term issue in this country.
It's even worse, the entire ideology is that industrial policy can't, by definition, be better than what the market would decide without interference. So every kind of actual strategic decision making (i.e. investing a few hundred billions in the industries of importance for the next decade(s), or at least in the infrastructure supporting it) would actually make matters worse. That is essentially what neoliberalism is all about.
This is core reason why the German industry became so irrelevant in the last 2 decades: The rail infrastructure became pseudo privatized and now is in shambles (IIRC only about 60% of trains arrive on time). The PV industry was axed by the conservatives about 15 years ago and now is completely dominated by China. Even now, as the other EU countries demand strategic investments - and again the German conservatives say this ought to happen without any new debt. "We can only spend what we have", to quote Merz. Imagine China saying this about chip production, or even Sam Altman about compute hardware...