There used to be an old joke that went like this: "How do you make a billion dollars in the space business? Answer: start out with two billion dollars." And for

There used to be an old joke that went like this: "How do you make a billion dollars in the space business? Answer: start out with two billion dollars." And for a long time that was not necessarily inaccurate. Making money through innovation in the space business was difficult and rare, most of the money came from just being a big, reliable government contractor or sub-contractor. Let the government do the innovating, you'll build what they want and cash their checks, easy peasy. In the '90s there was a huge wave of "New Space" companies, some with better ideas than others, most fueled by silicon valley venture capital looking for "cool game changing technology". Unfortunately, that combo was not suited to the space business. A lot of companies got set up with their eyes on essentially quantum leap "beyond state of the art" technology, the sort of stuff that would warrant mass influxes of investment because it had the potential to result in orders of magnitude RoI down the road, just like the computer/software business. Except all of it was too far reaching, too ambitious, with not nearly enough R&D expenditure to make it real at the time (it likely would have cost billions). The archetypal plan for such companies was to build a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, likely a single stage rocket (aka RLV SSTO) and then swoop in and take over the launch business with hugely lower costs, all while launch orders would grow by orders of magnitude as well due to a booming space tourism business coupled with the deployment of multiple LEO satellite constellations. However, the investment capital dried up during the dot com bubble burst around 2000 and none of the companies had anything viable built already so they just starved to death. Meanwhile, the dot com bust also killed off the fantasies of mega satellite constellations and the launch market slowed down. It took a company like SpaceX to cut a pragmatic path toward innovation in space launch. Starting with a tried and tested design (2 stage kerolox) that dated back to the 1950s even. And being insanely practical as well as extremely cost and risk conscious through the whole process. They boostrapped into profitability with expendable launches. They built a "dual use" expendable/partially-reusable launcher so they could flight prove the technology using commercial launches. And so they could perform reusability R&D subsidized by commercial launches as well. Every single booster landing attempt they made before they nailed the process was R&D using tens of millions of dollars in flight hardware, except they got others to pay for the hardware and they just used it afterward, when normally the booster gets thrown away. Even a very smart megacompany like google wouldn't necessary have the savvy to attack the problem in that way. And if you look at what a crap-ton of money plugged into the high tech ecosystem does produce you can look at Blue Origin, who are performing a much more traditional development program. Start with sub-orbital, build and test everything in a reusable flight configuration on your own dime before offering it up commercially, etc. And the result is much slower progress plus the requirement of massive infusions of cash up front for an extended period of time.