Maybe I'm too nice to the guy, but a lot of the stuff he comes up with sounds like public spitballing, made public to keep the interest high and the conversation flowing.
There's no question Elon Musk has revitalized enthusiasm for U.S. space enterprise. He doesn't have shareholders or a board of directors at SpaceX to answer to, so he can play a unique role in that respect even if a substantial part of it is Harold Hill theatrics. The pre-existing space infrastructure wasn't largely concerned with public interest or enthusiasm. It didn't
need it. And I don't mean that arrogantly; we knew who our customers were and they knew who we were, and no one needed to advertise during the Superbowl. Capturing the imagination of the American public was only a small part of the business model, so you got only the most basic public outreach efforts.
The problem is that the enthusiasm quickly became partisan. It was characterized as SpaceX succeeding where other companies failed due to incompetence and lazy stagnation, which wasn't especially fair. This doesn't mean everyone is entitled to share in the glory of one company's conspicuous innovation. But a more properly directed surge in public enthusiasm could have led to more aggressive changes in the NASA funding model and a more credible change in marketing posture among existing companies to appeal differently to corporate customers. So keeping the conversation flowing doesn't have to be rabidly adversarial. Inevitably someone will say, "That's so bold! Why isn't ULA thinking of similar things?"
