No, it's why they outcompeted every other space company in the world, public and private, and still have the spare capacity to put in orbit a constellation of 7600 satellites, more than half of all the active satellites on Earth.

Privatization of space is not really outcompeting - nobody was racing to build reusable launch vehicles.

The cost is also not fully "turnkey" - if you overwork your employees, fail to pay your suppliers, rely on subsidies, then of course you are going to reduce your cost.

And all of that happened before Musk fully lost his mind.

Efficiency wise from pure physics, they would have been better off developing something similar to Scaled Composites. Air breathing is way more efficient to get to altitude, then you do a High Altitude Orbit insertion, and then do your vertical landing. For stuff like Starlink Satellites that are rather small, you have to do more launches but the cost of launch goes down significantly.

Ahem, another company tried that approach and couldn’t get it to work. The fastest way to space is up. The fastest to orbit is a curve through the mesosphere to the exosphere to reach a speed of 11.2km/s.

They built the best vehicle that would work, today. Not some distant future of a possible way to get to space. An actual working way to get to space. Built on the backs of NASA engineers of the space coast of FL, Houston TX, CA, and AR. You can armchair architect another way, but they successfully built one. One that is reusable. Over and over and over and over again.

EU then followed. Then China. Then India (ordering could be wrong but). So it’s definitely something that works.

EDIT

Ok, EU doesn’t have a reusable rocket yet.

The main argument here is "smart people working at SpaceX".

Im not debating the fact that they were able to put together a product. Im also not debating that it was successful. Nor am I debating that any average person can work on rockets, you do need some engineering knowledge.

Im just arguing that the reason they got there wasn't because they managed to hire the best of the best engineers that are smart in one area but fail to understand how much Musk is doing politically. My claim is that Space X hired enough average intelligence, but super driven people, which is why they managed to build Falcon 9 through act of throwing money at it, and as supporting evidence of this, Starship is currently blowing up despite their supposed "learnings".

The Falcon 9 blew up a lot too. So do all the rockets until they are perfected. I know some SpaceX’ers and I wouldn’t classify them as average intelligence. On the contrary. I think a lot of people fail to realize how SpaceX works. Nothing musk can do will stop it. Sure, his antics have cause consumers to question his products but the United States government depends on SpaceX to function. The US Military needs SpaceX to function. While their public facing people may seem “average intelligence”, the vast majority of employees at SpaceX are high high IQ people.

No one else puts up a rocket about once a week. No one. :D

They have the most reliable rocket in the world.

Spontaneous Rapid Disassembly isn't a failure. It's an event. All data is recorded, studied, modeled, and reassessed for the next experiment. Like the Falcon 9, once the correct inputs are developed, it will become as routine as "Hey Siri..."

Fully agree.

However if your stuff keeps exploding after you have had quite a large number of those test events, something is amiss.

>Like the Falcon 9, once the correct inputs are developed, it will become as routine as "Hey Siri..."

TBD. Raptor engines are the equivalent of taking 2 liter inline 4 engine and putting on massive turbos to make it generate 1000 whp. Thats pretty much how you get the high pressure ratio.

The majority of recent failures have been due to counterfeit parts… parts that were supplied to a specification but failed to meet it. Last one was a nitrogen tank.