>On top of that, there was no guarantee that electric cars would ever be embraced, especially by Americans, who traditionally, love ICE muscle cars.
Generous subsidies for electrics in the US and other countries helped with that.
Like generous government money funnelled through NASA contracts helped Space X repeat what NASA did in the late 60s/early 70s, slightly improved, 40 years later...
Yes, I remember when NASA was launching reusable rockets as regular supply missions and weren't using 5% GDP, and did such a great job they didn't end up giving $400MM/year to Russia to hitch rides on the Soyuz for the last decade.
That would be the "slightly improved" part, "50 years later".
And NASA hasn't used "5% GDP" for 40 years. It has been less than 1% since 1973. Actually scratch that, it has been less than 1% the federal budget, which is much much less than the GDP.
Of course all that 50-years of IP got handed to the "private visionaries" of SpaceX for free, or rather, along with money paid to them...
If it was that low risk and easy for Musk, why didn't NASA just do it themselves? Or why not some other person? There seems to be quite a lot of space x competitors not doing as well as space x.
