This scenario has played out before, with Faster, Better, Cheaper from the 90s, and kind-of/loosely with STS.
> Missions marked with an asterisk were considered failures (5 spacecraft failed in space; 1 project was canceled), putting the overall FBC success rate at a paltry 63%. This low success rate—and the fact that 4 of them occurred in one year, 1999—are what linger in the space community’s memory.
> For example, an examination of the timeline reveals an often-missed observation: the first 9 of 10 missions were successful, a 90% success rate. The FBC approach broke when proposed missions began getting more ambitious without a change in schedule and cost cap. The early successes made everyone overconfident and the missions became too aggressive for their constraints, leading to failures (Launius and McCurdy 2005):
>
> “In hindsight, it becomes apparent that [NASA’s] success in the nineties had led the review and selection committees to accept very ambitious and complex proposals with a very high science return on budgets and schedules that were quite optimistic.”
Pathfinder and Sojourner demonstrated new technologies and were done on a budget smaller than one of Viking's experiments. The failures soured the public memory, lead to congressional hearings, and funding cuts.
NASA is a public institution and has been beholden to the Senate's irrational whims for it's entire life.
SpaceX is a private company. They receive public grants, sure, but they have a profitable launch business with the Falcon 9. Their requirement is that they can sustain themselves, not that they can keep their own internal project from being cancelled by directive of the US government.
On some level what the public (and really, it's space nerds like us) think doesn't really matter. The public would in fact be hard pressed to stop them getting contracts from the US government provided they can underbid Boeing at this point.
> Missions marked with an asterisk were considered failures (5 spacecraft failed in space; 1 project was canceled), putting the overall FBC success rate at a paltry 63%. This low success rate—and the fact that 4 of them occurred in one year, 1999—are what linger in the space community’s memory.
> For example, an examination of the timeline reveals an often-missed observation: the first 9 of 10 missions were successful, a 90% success rate. The FBC approach broke when proposed missions began getting more ambitious without a change in schedule and cost cap. The early successes made everyone overconfident and the missions became too aggressive for their constraints, leading to failures (Launius and McCurdy 2005):
>
> “In hindsight, it becomes apparent that [NASA’s] success in the nineties had led the review and selection committees to accept very ambitious and complex proposals with a very high science return on budgets and schedules that were quite optimistic.”
http://www.elizabethafrank.com/colliding-worlds/fbc
Pathfinder and Sojourner demonstrated new technologies and were done on a budget smaller than one of Viking's experiments. The failures soured the public memory, lead to congressional hearings, and funding cuts.
The public is a fickle master.