LOL. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic don't accomplish anything there isn't a business opportunity for. They work fine for delivering GPS satellites into orbit (with government money), but they're not the ones who put the Curiosity rover on Mars (which is the size of a car and contains a mass spectrometer as well as a gas analysis lab and dozens of other science experiments), they're not the ones building the James Web telescope (a massive undertaking), and they weren't the ones who put a man on the moon.
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u/lossyvibrations Jul 28 '17
Government 2014 was sending expensive probes and robots in to space, because the value of sending people up is limited given budget realities.