I'm not buying it either. NASA wasted billions on the space shuttle and single-use rockets until a programmer from Paypal showed them how to build re-usable rockets. Musk regularly refers to the economics of airliners as inspiration.
Obviously ideas to improve the economics of space exploration can come from anywhere, but one of the first places I'd look would be the Boeing machine shop.
And we haven't touched on human spaceflight, where economy must be balanced with safety. Hmm, I wonder what industry has the most experience with such engineering tradeoffs?
Obviously ideas to improve the economics of space exploration can come from anywhere, but one of the first places I'd look would be the Boeing machine shop.
And we haven't touched on human spaceflight, where economy must be balanced with safety. Hmm, I wonder what industry has the most experience with such engineering tradeoffs?