I forgot to mention another difference that's genuinely significant, but is more on the financial side than the engineering side. Those rockets and crew vehicles I listed above were typically paid for on what's called a "cost-plus" contract basis - i.e. if the cost of a project goes beyond the original estimate, the companies get extra money to cover that from the US government, no questions asked. The MIC loves these cost-plus contracts for obvious reasons.

But a lot of newer rockets and crew vehicles that NASA uses are under fixed-price contracts, which are exactly what they sound like. Also under fixed-price contracts are things like cargo delivery to the ISS using commercial vehicles. The MIC hates these because it means they can't milk NASA for extra cash. They have to perform on time and on budget, or else they lose money, and NASA isn't legally on the hook for a single additional penny. Anything SpaceX does for NASA is under a fixed-price contract. So are the other new companies in the launch or cargo business like Rocket Lab (small satellites) and Sierra Nevada (who are developing a cargo/crew spaceplane called Dreamchaser). But the biggest slap in the face to the MIC with regards to aerospace fixed-price contracts is the Starliner crew vehicle, built and launched by Boeing.

A bit of background. After the space shuttle program ended, NASA wanted a replacement crew vehicle that could launch from a US facility so that they didn't have to rely on Soyuz crew vehicles launched from Russia. But they didn't want to risk more years-long program shutdowns like after the Challenger and Columbia disasters, so they put out a tender for two crew vehicles, each made by different companies. If one was grounded due to some accident investigation, they wanted to still be able to launch crew to the ISS.

The US senate, all bought and paid for by the MIC and self-professed proud capitalists, found themselves in the uncomfortable situation of trying to keep the MIC grift going while professing to cut down on "wasteful spending" and promoting private business. In the end after a whole lot of public and private arguing a compromise was reached. Boeing would get about $5 billion to design, build, test, launch, and operate the Starliner capsule for up to six operational flights to the ISS. SpaceX got about $2.6 billion for the exact same requirements - yes, half what Boeing got. Everyone thought Boeing was the safe bet, and that SpaceX was the risky option. But what happened is that SpaceX met all the timeframe and safety and design and budget goals, and have now launched six operational NASA crew flights (plus a few others for non-NASA customers). And the worst thing that's ever happened on a Crew Dragon flight is that a primary toilet once stopped working and they had to use a backup toilet. (Everything is redundant in crewed spaceflight.)

But Boeing is fucked.

Boeing has been years late in developing Starliner. They've blown well past their internal budget. So far they've lost more than $1.6 billion that NASA is not legally on the hook for. The first uncrewed test flight was a years-late disaster that almost resulted in the test vehicle behind lost in two different ways. The onboard clock was 10 hours off, resulting in the vehicle doing the wrong things at the wrong times, and that cannot be allowed to happen in spaceflight. It was only during the emergency in-orbit software fixes for that problem that they found another software problem that would have resulted in a dead crew (if there had been crew on board).

The short version of that second problem is that the Starliner vehicle is in separate parts: the capsule that comes back to Earth with the crew, and the support hardware (the "service module") that's jettisoned before re-entry. Pretty normal for capsule-type crewed spacecraft. Russia's Soyuz does it, Apollo did it, NASA's Lockeed-Martin-built Orion will do it, China's Shenzhou does it, etc etc etc. The jettisoned service module was supposed to do a 90° turn and then fire its engines to get well out of the way for safety so that they're on very different re-entry trajectories. But what was actually programmed was an incorrect thruster firing sequence that would have slammed the service module straight ahead into the heat shield at high thrust. That would be a death sentence for the crew. If they didn't die immediately from structural failure, they would have died on re-entry Columbia-style as the heat shield failed.

Boeing has done one semi-successful uncrewed test flight since that they've had to pay for out-of-pocket. Those out of pocket costs include buying an extra rocket launch at over $400 million. And that launch was plagued with delays and technical problems that have basically grounded the program. Their first crew mission was supposed to fly in 2017. It's now looking like it won't fly until next spring at best assuming no further technical issues, a 7 year delay. And not only have Boeing never flown a crew to the ISS, but SpaceX has picked up contract extensions to be Boeing's replacement on the crew rotation schedule.

Boeing has been able to weasel a few hundred million from the US senate since then, but even the corrupt senators know that they can't do much more public than that without pissing off both deficit hawks and the general public. Management at Boeing's aerospace group are rumoured to be in panic mode. Starliner's problems are bleeding them cash, but if they outright renege on their contract, they risk losing lucrative military contracts to their rivals.

Again, I'm not trying to defend the prick who owns most of SpaceX. I'm just laying out the facts of the current situation. Of course I'd love to live in a world where NASA has free rein to allocate money as they alone deem necessary, and to actually build production rockets and crew vehicles in-house as they currently do with science probes. But if I had to choose between fixed-price SpaceX and the cost-plus MIC grifters, I'll begrudgingly pick the former.

So what's happened is that a whole lot of people in the media who get their paycheques in part or in full from the MIC are doing all sorts of hand-wringing about the "commercialization of space", when they're really just acting on behalf of their MIC paymasters who are pissed that they can't do the usual old cost-plus grift anymore.