> From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc.
Well... that's "starve the beast" in action. A lot of things we take for granted, that underpin our modern ways of life, came to be due to government investing. Laser, radar, microwaves, the early Internet, that all was military R&D.
"Unfortunately" (well, for the rich and the MIC, at least) there is no way for people to siphon off money in government-funded research, so once the libertarian/small-state BS completely took over following the collapse of the USSR, a lot of that got torn down or supplemented with enough bureaucracy to make Germans cry... and that's why reusable rockets were not invented at NASA but at SpaceX instead.
Reusable rockets were not invented by nasa because their mission was exploration not commercialization.
Reusable rockets were "invented" by Lars Blackmore when he was working at JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab). I say invented because like anything in the evolution of engineering, credit is messy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Propulsion_Laboratory
> Founded in 1936 by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers, the laboratory is now owned and sponsored by NASA and administered and managed by Caltech.
Minimum-Landing-Error Powered-Descent Guidance for Mars Landing Using Convex Optimization http://larsjamesblackmore.com/BlackmoreEtAlJGCD10.pdf
Elon originally wanted parachutes and was convinced by Lars to go with self landing rockets.
Cheap reusable rockets allow for a lot more research for a lot less money.
Unfortunately, as the early history of SpaceX shows, it required a lot of failures to learn from to design the current crop of rockets. And that's the advantage that private R&D has... as long as the person in charge has money, failure is an option, because in anything publicly funded, any failure will relentlessly be blamed on the currently governing party by the opposition.