Tesla might, they seem to have reached critical mass... but I don't know how far SpaceX will get given he made driving down $/kg to orbit a personal mission in

Tesla might, they seem to have reached critical mass... but I don't know how far SpaceX will get given he made driving down $/kg to orbit a personal mission in order for his entire Mars stuff to be even remotely feasible as an endeavour (to speak nothing of how likely it is to succeed) Without someone to say "Falcon 9 isn't good enough" when its already crushing the launch industry and all the competition is racing to catch up to its capabilities, which could take as much as a decade for slower moving companies like ULA (partial reuse goal is years away) or ArianeSpace, and regardless of the timeline often requiring significant efforts to develop reusability technologies that fit existing designs, whole new rocket design programs to add reusability, or fleeing to niches where such reuse is not viable (rapid schedule (in terms of calendar days between purchase and launch day) in the hope of holding onto some market share... SpaceX without Elon would quite possibly turn into Blue Origin, who's glacial schedule is moving so slowly, the largest customer they have signed is for their engines, and due to widespread rumours those engines wont happen on time, the customer made a very big deal about showing off that they do indeed finally have some engines they can use to build their first test rocket. Regardless of his many faults, personal and professional, he as CEO of a privately held company who gets to make the big decisions about what does and does not get built, has been responsible for pushing forward the space rocket business in a way that hasn't been seen in nearly half a century... The Apollo era saw companies push designs and innovate and resulted in actual test hardware programs with such experiments as Aerojet's 260, a 6.6m diameter solid rocket motor with 16 MN of thrust, equivalent to the entire Saturn 1 first stage. The funding cuts post Apollo shrunk the industry into just relying on the R&D from the Military Industrial Complex side of the aerospace companies and so we got decades of slow incremental progress mainly off the back of maintaining the fleets of ICBMs.