Interesting that I never seem to hear anyone complain about privatizing spaceflight. (Caveat: Our rockets, etc., were always built by defense/aerospace contractors, AFAIK.) Halliburton, Blackwater, etc., are bad privatizations, but SpaceX is good.
That said, SpaceX is doing exciting things more affordably than we did them before, so it’s hardly puzzling.
Mercenaries have been associated with some bad things in the past - including the past of the United States - and so they are generally not seen as a good thing.
Private transportation systems are not really equivalent.
Moreover, privatization in and of itself is very often an excuse to throw money to cronies - certainly the case with Blackwater in particular; a mercenary costs hundreds of thousands a year to replace $30K or so in support costs for a regular military person. Just calling something "privatization" is usually enough for knee-jerk libertarians to assume it's saving you money - when it's just another item in the ol' kleptocracy toolkit.
Privatization as a concept also takes a hit from the bone-stupid idea of privatizing Social Security - which is just another way of passing risk on to the little guy while making sure our friends in the financial industry get to buy bigger yachts.
Privatization in the space industry really does save money - but much, much more importantly, it's the logical next step in making sure space technology gets viable. Long past time to get the free market involved there.
1: The real kind, where the government simply stops doing an activity (or does it too ineffectively) and a market appears out of opportunity - like SpaceX. Libertarians like this because it makes the government smaller.
2: The fake kind, where a government decides that something it does should now be done by a private entity under contract. Blackwater is one example, most privatized railways are another. These seem to port the annoying bits from government (the private operator is accountable to the government, not the "customer", and there is still no competition) and while the typically predictable cost is good for budgeting, the real benefit is too often in keeping politicians' fingers out of day-to-day operations. Most libertarians would prefer you'd just get the governments hands out of the operation altogether.
I'm interested to hear where you get $30K in support costs for a regular service member. Very rough calculations indicate at least $100,000 per person based solely on the "military personnel" (payroll, perhaps food etc.?), of $154 billion. That's not even touching the $283 billion in operations and maintenance.
I'm just going on take-home pay, tacitly assuming that the infrastructure required to support a person is roughly equivalent. And honestly, Blackwater's infrastructure also probably cost more, but I was just looking at salary. Mercenaries are expensive.
It is an interesting (and also important) line. Generally, it is services that fall under the category of "public good" that are provided by government (in a capitalist nation anyway). These are things that, by their nature, a) must be afforded to everyone for them to be effective, and/or b) for which there is no (or little) commercial incentive to produce.
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You know, I was going to write a lengthy explanation of what that means for your examples, but I'm late for work, and it's on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
But suffice to say, there's no natural monopoly in space flight, and they're getting paid (by both the private and public sector) for their services, so space flight isn't a public good (anymore at least).
Really? Have you been living under a rock? EVERYONE is complaining about privatizing spaceflight. Congressmen, 24-hour news hosts, op-ed writers... there is (sadly) a concerted effort out there to kill this privatization effort.
That said, SpaceX is doing exciting things more affordably than we did them before, so it’s hardly puzzling.