What has BO achieved anything or demonstrated anything so far in Space tech, that they deserve any funding?
Passing over the obvious gaffe that
@favo pointed out, your assessment on the linearity of time is accurate. Indeed, one does not have a product before they have a product.
The space industry is almost a worst case example throughout industry, because the investment to create a product is so massive. Instead, what is often demonstrated in order to receive funding is prototype concepts and sometimes prototype technologies, and general capability--both existing and planned--of the company. It is polar opposite to, say, consumer electronics or even automobiles, where the approach is build-it-and-they-will-come. In the space industry, basically nothing happens without someone first giving you money to do something, whether that money comes from investors (like SpaceX) or The Man (for things like the SLS program). In fact, pretty much the first of everything in space is funded by the latter, including predecessors to most of SpaceX's first order advancements, notably landing hardware from flight (Apollo) and reusing flight hardware (STS).
Layering extreme irony to the whole conversation, Blue Origin is basically the only space entity that--to a significant degree--
doesn't operate in the fund-me-first way, because their operating budget is largely pulled out of some weird guy's rainy day jar.
