Comment by rainsford

"Building things" is not science, it's engineering. We could certainly compare the outcomes of "bureaucratic" science against the free market variety, but there's basically no free market science going on to support such a comparison.

This isn't a value judgement. Engineering is just as important as science, but just as more science is not a replacement for engineering, neither does better engineering free us from the need to keep pursuing science. And at the end of the day, SpaceX might be an impressive engineering company, but we still need the scientists. And it's weird how often the success of SpaceX is brought up as an implicit argument that we can send all the scientists to work on farms or whatever without any ill effects.

It also seems notable that a company like SpaceX is an obvious candidate to bring back the 20th century style corporate funded scientific research organizations to underpin their engineering efforts in a way that would presumably be free of the hated "bureaucracy". But if they've done so, I haven't heard about it.