All of your comment is pointless. My whole point was research, not research and development. No shit, in countries where the predominant mode of production is capitalism, where it’s been socially determined that development is done by private companies, the main source of funding for research and development is private capital.

In order to maintain a monopoly you have to keep innovating and offering a quality service

No, you have to consolidate market power, bribe officials, perform marketing campaigns, buy the competition, and abuse your overwhelming economic and legal power and economy of scale. Good examples are car manufacturers eliminating the public transit systems in the beginning of the 20th century USA, natural monopolies such as energy, water and internet supply, or the significant additional rise of prices all over the economy as a consequece of corporate greed after the 2022 inflation episode. You’ve been lied about your economic axioms and you live in an imaginary world of neoclassical/neoliberal economics that have 0 predictive power.

Starship has

failed. What starship has, is failed.