Comment by rainsford

> The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-shall-not-be-named came along. SpaceX took the breakthroughs that existed in the US in things like control theory, which the same science establishment had failed to value appropriately.

I feel like you're confusing "science" and "engineering". SpaceX is fundamentally an engineering company, not a scientific one. Don't get me wrong, they've done impressive work in engineering innovation, but that's fundamentally different from scientific research. And as the article points out, engineering innovation from the likes of SpaceX is usually reliant on that foundational scientific innovation, which in turn is essentially useless without an engineering partner to realize scientific discoveries.

> It doesn't look like the science establishments of any country are actually successfully feeding their innovation machines, or have done so for decades.

Really? Is it just a coincidence that up until recently the US had some of the most robust scientific funding and was an unbeatable source of engineering innovation? For that matter, are there any real counterexamples where science research is non-existent but engineering excellence abounds?