I think the thing that a lot of people are still stuck at is the NASA attitude of "we've spent a lot of money on this already, we Need to make sure it works first try".
Whereas SpaceX is more like Kerbal Space Program in that if it blows up, at least you're having fun.
And while they had some failures early on with their early rockets, the Falcon 9 is now a very reliable craft that's done dozens of successful missions, successful recoveries (which I think they still consider a bonus rather than a goal) and re-uses, and a streamlined launch process, which has become more economic - and possibly profitable - over time.
I will add "possibly" profitable though, given that it feels like the majority of their launches is for their own Starlink project, which is costing them billions - but it's a project to ensure use and reuse of their rockets, instead of the company going stale waiting for customers.
I know I'm being nitpicky, but Falcon 9 completed 223 missions since 2010 with 221 being total success, and 60 missions completed in 2022 alone. So way more than "dozens".
Elon Musk also said during one of the Tim Dodd interviews that the shuttle had so many limitations because they locked in the design too early. One limitation is the difficult, fragile and hard to reuse heat-shield on the shuttle.
The NASA approach makes it far to expensive to change the design down the road, since that requires resetting all the analysis. Whereas the SpaceX approach never stopped changing things and always tested them in flight.
Much cheaper to take a known good and polished design like Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon and do the analysis after you've proven it works well for non-human flights.
i think people forget they crashed a lot of starships doing the suborbital tests before they got one right. I think we'll see the same with the booster, expect more qualified tests success before you see something a layperson would call 100% success.
Whereas SpaceX is more like Kerbal Space Program in that if it blows up, at least you're having fun.
And while they had some failures early on with their early rockets, the Falcon 9 is now a very reliable craft that's done dozens of successful missions, successful recoveries (which I think they still consider a bonus rather than a goal) and re-uses, and a streamlined launch process, which has become more economic - and possibly profitable - over time.
I will add "possibly" profitable though, given that it feels like the majority of their launches is for their own Starlink project, which is costing them billions - but it's a project to ensure use and reuse of their rockets, instead of the company going stale waiting for customers.