If you believe this alone answers the question, you might miss something else, incredibly important, energy, specifically availabilty of it, which affects profitability, it peaked around the seventies and eighties, and now is in recession in the US / West at least, hence we've seen the loss of reusable deep space shuttles, supersonic commercial passenger flights etc. Starship with non radiation hardened electronics etc can't compare, even the ISS is now in question. Availabilty of energy just is not there, to do or maintain comparable developments.
There are ways we could get back to vastly increased availabilty of energy but it requires we trash the for profit economy, choosing instead to go with non profit solar, issuing solar indexed stimulus to all people, it looks like we will have to do this anyhow for any survival at all, so maybe, fingers crossed, if we see the required upset, we will again see all potential geniuses like the one you mentioned, being fully funded and empowered to achieve all their ambitions, manifesting as interplanetary travel etc. But until then, we will have to accept Russia, and China, might well enjoy greater enegy availabilty for now, given their access to grearer energy resources.
China looks like it might have managed to at least partially be monetising solar but it's hard to say, given difficulty of access to data we might use to try to analyse that.