content: It has nothing to do with price. It is 100% cronyism.  Building military aircraft isn't exactly the easiest industry to get into and so the biggest players, Lockheed and Boeing, are protected by enormous barriers to entry. That means prices go up and competence goes down - the Comcast recipe. They're also the same companies responsible for the fact that, until SpaceX, rocket technology has had only marginal improvements since the moon landing. For that industry to be upset you'd need an extremely wealthy rocket scientist (because venture capital damn sure isn't going to touch such a risky/expensive investment) with not only a desire to start building rockets, but to be able technologically overcome Boing/Lockheed before their money ran out. What were the odds..?