Im not reading all this so Ill just respond to the first paragraph. The space industry was dead in the water before spaceX showed up. Minimal innovation and spend trending down every year and now spaceX has sparked a complete reversal. Competition matters.
> I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA.
We still have lead pipes to many houses in chicago, and will for the foreseeable future. The water supply people(government) have utterly failed at replacing them in a timely fashion.
> Open source projects improve all the time
Because theyre extremely competitive. With minimal barriers to entry there are different devs trying to get their code merged and different projects trying to be the top dog. When one shows weakness another pops up.
Illinois is mandating lead service line replacement. I'm not wild about it. Solubility of lead in Chicago municipal service water is very low, because the lines are mineralized by the phosphates in the water. Have your water service tested; you're probably more than fine. But replacing the water lines disrupts those lines, which ironically does introduce lead into your water (for a time).
Regardless, Illinois munis don't really have a choice about this anymore.
> The space industry was dead in the water before spaceX showed up.
The point was space telescopes. Nice attempt goal post move.
You mention NASA and the space industry. Sorry, but I'm failing to see the connection. NASA does cutting edge space exploration. They have no customers, they sell nothing, they aren't by any definition "an industry". Anything that's simple enough to be taken on by "industry" they contract out. They only take on the near impossible stuff - like landing a rover on mars. And they have a near impecible record at pull those sorts of things off. Amazing. Literally world beating. Bravo.
Most of their feats are world firsts, almost all are far harder than the previous one they pulled off. They have no competition. Yet your claim was, and I quote, "Things don’t improve without competition". I'm getting cognitive dissonance here. Clearly they do.
> Because theyre extremely competitive.
Do you develop much open source? Do you even use it? The "man in Nebraska" meme is so common it even has a cartoon: https://xkcd.com/2347/ Trust me, that man truly wishes he had some competition. He doesn't, but he plods on, turning out the code that supports the internet without it. Again we have a clear counter example to your thesis "you can't have improvement without competition". These examples are everywhere. You would have to be willfully blind not to see them.
Look, no one argues competitive markets aren't a great tool. The trouble is they aren't that easy to create. Then competition weakens. The solution isn't to go into denial and claim there will be no improvement. Or worse claim being privately owned means there is competition, so we will be ok if we just sell it off. That's just daft. In fact it's worse than daft. Believing lies peddled corporations that want to control stuff you must buy from them at a price they dictate is like subscribing to a cult.
> I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA.
We still have lead pipes to many houses in chicago, and will for the foreseeable future. The water supply people(government) have utterly failed at replacing them in a timely fashion.
> Open source projects improve all the time
Because theyre extremely competitive. With minimal barriers to entry there are different devs trying to get their code merged and different projects trying to be the top dog. When one shows weakness another pops up.