Space is a perfect example that this isn't true. It kept going up and up with NASA/Boeing. The Space Shuttle ended up costing, in total, $2.2 billion per launch! [1] The SLS, if it ever finishes, was expected to cost more than $2 billion per launch [2], and that's before we went into inflation land. Add the inflation and the fact that expected costs tend to be dwarfed by real costs, and it's easy to see it going for $3+ billion per launch.
By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch. And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost down another order of magnitude. Without significant competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs come down is if you have an ideologically motivated player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with SpaceX.
The overwhelming majority of SpaceX's revenue has been government contracting. That is starting to diversify in the last 2-3 years with more truly private launches and with Starlink, but that's relatively new, and even so government is a very, very large share of revenue.
Many were. I'm not saying this is terrible-- these programs cost too much for private entities to bear all the risk, and most of the programs that SpaceX has gotten funding from have been well-run programs.
COTS paid for vehicle development for Falcon-9 and Dragon; CRS paid for flights. COTS was a pretty well-managed program with a lot of clear milestones for funding release.
The troubled Artemis program has paid for a whole lot of Starship development and demonstration. It's questionable how well Starship actually meets Artemis needs, so this is more troubling.
And, of course, the government has bought early flights with no guarantee of success, including just to fly masses/demosats. DARPA/NASA/ORS paid for the first 3 Falcon I failures.
OK granted. NASA and legacy aerospace contractors were milking a cash cow and never thought they would face a new competitor.
But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today has not really advanced.
