Not harsh. SpaceX has a much bigger vision than selling expensive one ofs to NASA. No vision, no guts, no glory indeed. This is the way that big companies eventually die.
Story time. I was working as a Computer networking consultant back in the early 1990s when twisted pair (cat 5) Ethernet was just being invented and standardized. I remember talking to a senior product manager who had just left his job at Northern Telecom. He had been pushing for Nortel to come out with their own version since they had patents and technology, and manufacturing expertise. He realized he was spending way more time trying to convince upper management of something than actually working on a product, so he left the company and joined a Silicon Valley startup. Nortel was bankrupt within 10 years, once a Canadian blue chip stock.
Frankly, I could care less if Boeing went under. What’s scary though is that this same mentality of slow, expensive product development and manufacturing pervades the US defense industry. The war in Ukraine is showing how big a problem that is, with our stocks of Stingers and Javelins getting dangerously low. Russia might yet win that war, and they’ll do it via a long slog which will eventually deplete Natos ability to supply Ukraine with weapons.
