Tom

NASA is moving because there are contractors who have the ability to provide the vehicles they want, if NASA hadn't established the market in the first place these contractors would not exist. Private capital will not pioneer unless they have a clear indication that the market exists. But NASA also proved something else, for the time being the Moon is not a viable place to develop a mining industry, so we don't see any rush to invest capital in developing Moon mines. We didn't see any private capital providing the next generation of space vehicle until NASA indicated that it both wanted the vehicles and was vacating the field. In fact what private industry has come up with isn't next generation, just incremental development of existing technology, technology that can be exploited for profit

As far as barbershops are concerned the technology was settled long ago but no private enterpreneur invested capital in proving the service to Congress so the government created the market. Obviously it is time to vacate and allow private enterprise to take over

Of course if you go back to it's origins ,it wasn't any government agency that spurred the advent of the age of aviation. I wonder how the Wright Brothers did it without that government contract ? The government didn't develop the DC-3 . We had Boeing and Martin and Douglas develop the airplanes. And with that innovation came the business associated with air transportation
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As for the moon ; the few short manned missions there 40 years ago were not enough to determine anything. The Chinese will go there and colonize it .

The reason we won the race to the moon was because the private sector did the work ,not the government barbershop version the Soviets had .But we go away from that model as NASA matured ;and that is one of the big reasons human space exploration is stuck in low earth orbit.

NASA is spending a fortune on it's own versions of reusable launch vehicles .If government money is involved ,then it should go as a prize for the best system that private companies can develop. Something similar to the X Prize Ansari X Prize where a non-profit organization sets up a cash prize competition ,with the prize going to the company that accomplishes the goal of flying a reusable vehicle to the moon and back .

This is how the Transcontinental Rail Road was built . It took 7 years to build it across the country . In contrast ,it took most of a decade after 9-11 for the various government agencies to have plan for rebuilding ground zero.

Tom you are speaking of a different age where aircraft could be cobbled together in a shed and people weren't motivated by profit. The DC3 was a response to commercial aviation the market developed and you had madmen like Howard Hawks developing aircraft.

I'll be surprised if the Chinese colonise the Moon but you can see that a government can have a focus to achieve for national prestige. The USA once had this but only when spurred into action by Russia. The Chinese are now spurred into action by the USA even if they are late comers, but we should ask ourselves why the USA abandoned the Moon, was it lack of competition?

I also know of a transcontential railway that was built by government because it would not have been built otherwise. What we are seeing is a different emphasis in different places but you cannot leave nation building to private enterprise, because what you get piecemiel development