They were never competition, exactly. NASA doesn’t make spacecraft, they buy and sometimes modify them from industrial concerns and always have.
What they did do was be a federal space agency, with all that implies otherwise, which means a private company can’t charge premium rates to do the things that absolutely have to happen that they were doing.
This is the privatization and militarization (through the inevitability of Space Force absorbing some responsibility) of space.
It’s not really competition anymore though, since they often use SpaceX rockets for what they do now.
They were never competition, exactly. NASA doesn’t make spacecraft, they buy and sometimes modify them from industrial concerns and always have.
What they did do was be a federal space agency, with all that implies otherwise, which means a private company can’t charge premium rates to do the things that absolutely have to happen that they were doing.
This is the privatization and militarization (through the inevitability of Space Force absorbing some responsibility) of space.