“it makes no sense for them to try to compete with SpaceX in the launch market”
no, it really doesn’t.
Elon Musk may be full of it when it comes to building electric cars (after all, batteries are WAY harder than rockets), but his SpaceX corporation has made mind-boggling advances in rocket technology, leaving stodgy NASA back in the dust of the Model T days of space exploration.
One of the latest thing that’s mind blowing is the 3-D printing of the entire SuperDraco rocket engine chamber with Inconel superalloy:
Inconel is notoriously hard to work with.