I really am glad that SpaceX exists, and I want them to be successful. To me, it represents a grand intersection of my technical interests, the dream of space travel that was instilled in me since I was a child, and my moral belief that government has no place in this (nor in many other things).
SpaceX is making progress toward real commercial access to orbit. But is there any work being done by business farther out than that?
I think government space flight is a dead end, but for economic reasons foremost.
NASA can only take a politically-bounded slice of a fixed size tax pie. It spends the money it was allocated and comes back with empty hands. Unless the USA is in a military-driven space race with a superpower rival, it's going to get the crumbs and it has no way of getting more than that. Success does not breed success, only photo-ops. If the photo-ops get stale, success can breed apathy and abandonment.
A commercial space company comes back from each successful flight with more money than it set out. It causes the economy to grow, actually increasing the size of the pie, and the slice it gets is investment-bounded. Success will bring more investment. There is no political upper limit on how high it can scale.
An interplanetary culture is going to require utterly enormous amounts of wealth by modern standards - only commerce has the potential to create that much wealth.
I just hope we can get started with the asteroid mining for rare earth metals before we run out of the rare earth metals to build computers that will get us there.
We've had real commercial access to orbit for over 20 years. The solution SpaceX is offering now however is to give companies (or god-forbid, individuals) a much cheaper ticket to space, albeit at a much lower probability of that cargo actually getting there.
Rocket launching will always be an expensive endeavor. It's the nature of the business. The interesting question now is whether the chance your cargo getting to space is proportional to cost, and is that something you're willing to risk as a customer.
SpaceX is making progress toward real commercial access to orbit. But is there any work being done by business farther out than that?