Feel free to have whatever opinion you want of Elon Musk, but SpaceX has been wildly successful by just about every metric. In terms of cost, they are launching payloads at 1/44th the cost per kg of the Space Shuttle and at a fraction of the cost of their private sector competitors. Also, there's the fact that we were bumming rides off the Russians for a decade because of NASA's issues...
https://medium.com/geekculture/spacex-vs-nasa-cost-4fae45482...