The general answer is that you have up and coming companies like SpaceX (and maybe soon Blue Origin) who are pushing hard to reduce costs and be competitive, ye

The general answer is that you have up and coming companies like SpaceX (and maybe soon Blue Origin) who are pushing hard to reduce costs and be competitive, yet ULA, Boeing, Lockheed (ULA is Boeing and Lockheed actually) keep winning contracts where they offer less, but charge more. And people are left wondering why? And then people begin to notice that those companies have lots of friends working at the Pentagon, NASA, etc. On the latest bids for the moon landers, a high ranking NASA official had to step down because it appears he leaked information about the bids directly to Boeing when it was clear they were going to lose this big contract[0]. Just look at the Commercial Crew program, where private companies bring astronauts to the ISS for NASA, Boeing is being paid 60% more per seat[1]. You would expect that means they're of higher quality- yet here we are in August 2020 and so far they've failed their no-humans-test-flight, while SpaceX has sent and returned two astronauts already. The real question in my mind is why this latest contract with the Pentagon went 60% ULA, 40% SpaceX when it could just have easily done the 60-40 split the other way, saving a lot of taxpayer money while maintaining identical redundancy. [0]https://www.space.com/boeing-moon-lander-nasa-doug-loverro-resignation.html https://www.space.com/boeing-moon-lander-nasa-doug-loverro-r... [1]https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-prices.html https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-pri...