Re: Public company woes
"It's a government program, it's supposed to cost gazillons of dollars!"
No, its' not. They still do, but they are not supposed to.
"To keep costs down and timelines from exploding, they incorporated used engines and stretched some SRB's there is experience with."
And it was a spectacular failure at both as the cost still ballooned well beyond budget and took much longer than expected. Both mainly due to overly optimistic estimates of the amount of re-engineering required to convert them to do a job they were not originally designed for.
"In the mean time, there's hope that some trailblazing can be done with an eye towards commercial activities on the moon."
As has been widely published they already have, and a few much closer to home too.
"Doing the ground work will be expensive and a government(s) agency is the only entity that can do it."
About the only thing the government can do (at great taxpayer expense) is help coordinate the disparate companies involved into producing something resembling a coherent plan. And being the government it's not very good at that, hence the great taxpayer expense.
"so whatever NASA are allowed to spend won't be that big of a deal"
While NASA's budget has mostly increased over the years in a lot of cases all it has allowed them to do is keep their heads above water. In some cases that was due to inflation along with to very ambitious science projects eating away larger and larger parts of their budget and reallocation of funds from solid scientific research projects to pet political projects such as SLS. Unfortunately we do spend an ungodly amount of money on waste, fraud, and abuse (AKA military spending). I want the best military in the world, in today's world you never know when you might need it, but we probably spend a least twice as much as is necessary for that.
"Starship is not ready and very very late with big issues yet to resolve. Reusablity is completely unproven."
Yes it is late, welcome to the real world, a place seldomly visited by Elon's brain before making prognostications. Many of the big issues have been resolved or at least have had great progress in resolving them made but there are a couple that obviously need more work. While reusablity for "Starship" has yet to be proven SpaceX has an unprecedented amount of experience making reusable spacecraft so I put that one in the big issues to be resolved but very probably resolvable.
"With SPCX being configured as an everything company that burns around $1,000,000,000/month, investors aren't the sharpest tools in the shed."
Yeah I wish SpaceX would stick to what it obviously does best and work to make that profitable but with Elon at the tippy top I can only hope that the people doing the day to day work there stay focused enough to do that under Elon's very full nose.
"Starship may never pay off. It's also an expensive launch option."
Well I agree it may never pay off, then again it may. I'm 50/50 on that one.
"It might look good for a full mass payload, provided it can do what Elon has been promising, but there's almost no 100t class payloads needing to be launched. "
But you could launch 100t using multiple deployments with one launch like the Falcon 9 already does with smaller payloads. They have proven that "Starship" has the ability to deploy multiple payloads. And referencing your earlier remark about trailblazing, there are multiple projects such as LEO space stations to replace or enhance current space station capabilities and several types of commercial enterprises all of which will require launch weights that only two rockets currently being tested could lift into space. Any attempts to use the moon as a permanent or semi-permanent outpost for commercial or scientific purposes will need lift capabilities that far exceed what we now have in operation. Making such lift capability reusable for all of the above may be the tipping point to making a profit. Finally as I'm sure you've noticed, our solar system is a very big place with lots of things for us to do, useful and otherwise which will again require heavy lift capabilities that are currently in development.
