It’s also important to recognize companies like SpaceX benefit heavily from socialized infrastructure. For example, they lease a pad at Kennedy Space Center and use DoD infrastructure at Vandenberg.
While there's perhaps some excessive idolatry of SpaceX and shade on ULA and NASA initiatives, I'm not sure that subsidies--somewhat overt or otherwise--are necessarily a bad thing. Certainly DARPA has a long history.
I tend to agree. I think the hybrid system has a lot of benefits, but unfortunately many of these discussions seems to devolve into framing the issue as a false dichotomy.
