Memes

I think a good example of the tradeoffs between government and private companies would be lunar landing programs. If you throw cold war nuclear money at the problem, you can do things fast and ambitiously like Apollo. But nowadays for Artemis, the urgency is a lot less, so there's all sorts of games with Congress (putting things all over the place that don't make sense, lunar gateway etc) to make sure they keep funding. That results in a much more expensive much less capable rocket (SLS) than something like starship that has a whole lot less political constraints like starship. NASA can and has gotten things done well, but the funding and incentive structure makes it harder.