Sorry to reply twice, but I think there's more here to address. First, the thing about cars doesn't work even for individuals, because it's not comparable. Bu

Sorry to reply twice, but I think there's more here to address. First, the thing about cars doesn't work even for individuals, because it's not comparable. Buying an all-new spacecraft or aircraft isn't anything like buying a car. Cars are engineered and designed for a market, and manufactured in quantities of tens to hundreds of thousands or more. This is more like getting an extremely custom house built for yourself (think something like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, not a subdivision house): you have to find someone who can architect it, and someone to build it. Neither of these is easy because the house is entirely unique and not even like other houses. It's not something you can just go pay someone to do and not think much about, like you can with a car: you have to be actively involved in the design and construction process. >If the government started bidding out smaller real hardware contracts to new companies What companies have these abilities? Would you have a super-custom mansion designed and built by some random guy you met on a street corner? Of course not. You have to find someone who can actually do the work, and you have to be careful because a bunch of people will claim they can do it, but they really can't, so you can't accept their bids, and that means you have to do a lot of work in verifying they're capable of delivering. Building a new spacecraft or airplane isn't trivial, and isn't something some small company can just do, like you seem to believe. How is a new company going to start up that can actually do these things? The only reason SpaceX worked out is because a billionaire started it as a hobby project, and even there, it's been at it for well over a decade now. Same goes for Blue Origin: it wouldn't exist if it weren't for some billionaire who apparently had nothing better to do with his time. Even going back to the old days, this is what happened with TWA and Hughes aviation: Howard Hughes was a billionaire who inherited his fortune and got bored with oil drilling bits. You can't just award a hardware contract to some tiny company that has no ability to deliver on the contract in a reasonable timeframe.