I've worked on a huge space science project that was scattered across multiple countries in order to get the funding scale that the proposal seemed to require.

I've worked on a huge space science project that was scattered across multiple countries in order to get the funding scale that the proposal seemed to require. We got the impression that in order to get the thing built, if we had relied upon a single organization to fund the project, it would have been far more easy to kill during development. Most of us were new to this way of thinking. At the time, the engineers with the most experience in building these things had endured decades of minimal funding, and had learned to keep things as simple as possible. There was a lot of pushback against what was perceived as unnecessary complexity. What is the quote, that organizations will expand towards supporting the organization, rather than the goals of the organization... Well. Science is hard, rocket science more so. All of the other commercial launch programs have (as yet) failed to achieve anything close to sustainable orbital operations, unless they are also traditional aerospace defense contractors. ULA is Boeing/Northrop Grumman, and I can't recall but I think ArianneSpace is technically a commercial company rather than a national space agency. Both are very, very good at orbital launch. But comparing their funding structure to that of SpaceX seems a bit weird.