Will SpaceX be as generous with its IP as NASA was in the 1960s and 1970s? The original moon landing yielded huge technological advances, many of which made their way into commercial applications. Tesla may instead hoard these advances to increase the networth of Elon Musk.
Yes, in fact, because it was part of the contract stipulation by NASA. And apparently Blue Origin/National Team's proposal scored poorly in part because they wanted to keep some of the data rights from NASA.
And this is just a sort of contractor arrangement. NASA didn't build the Apollo lunar module with civil servants, either, they hired contractors.
This is what I worry about with privatization of space technology in general; a free market with competition can in some ways be more efficient than a government agency, but then again if all the parties are incentivized to hoard their technology then you could end up with a lot of duplicate work and wonky suboptimal designs to work around patents.
I wonder if NASA has any technology sharing provisions in their contracts? Or at least agreements to make components available for sale to NASA or competitors, and to share as much data as necessary to allow parts from multiple vendors to interoperate.
There are very general Space Act agreements that try to make dissemination of information as wide as possible, but there is plenty of wiggle room for proprietary information.
