It's criminal that the US is spending money on SLS when it is so incredibly inefficient and will very likely be completely outclassed in cost and operational ability by Starship.
There are no plans to use SLS for national security missions. SpaceX, ULA, and Rocket Lab all do national security missions, and hopefully Blue Origin can join in as well in the next couple years.
In a sense, all the ostensible science missions are really about national prestige and are therefore national security missions in a round-about way. I saw a recent presentation given by Michael Griffin in which he makes this point; the HST wouldn't really be worth all the trouble if not for the "America flexing on the world" angle.
Sure, but who’s actually launching those science missions these days? It’s all commercial providers. Recycling 1970’s technology into SLS and making it even less reusable isn’t a flex on the world, it’s pork barrel politics.
I share your thoughts towards the lameness of SLS, but consider: would it even be happening if not for the threat of China going to the Moon? It seems to me that the whole point is to spoil China's fun.
Considering the CEO of the company making Starship has openly messed with his other companies in support of Russia (thinking about Ukraine decisions), there is zero chance the US should get into a situation where Elon Musk is the decider of whether or not Americans can go to space. Honestly, SpaceX with Musk at the helm is becoming a massive national security problem, and as a taxpayer, I'm okay spending more money to insulate ourselves from some globo-billionaire who doesn't give even a single F about my country.
I thought the end facts on that were that SpaceX had never turned it on there, to avoid stepping over a redline, and simply refused to change that policy when the Ukranians requested it for a USV attack.
It's my understanding that Starlink said something to the effect of:
> No, we're absolutely not supporting offensive military operations. However, Starshield _is_ in that business, so go file your request through that so as to run it by the appropriate people in the US government to get their approval.
And -AFAIK- the request was run through Starshield, and it did get approved.
You’re criticizing the “foreign policy” of a company that decided not to directly participate in a foreign war, quite possibly at the request of the US government or under threat of having those satellites shot down which would be a catastrophe for space travel.
If the US wanted to contract spacex for Ukrainian military comms, they would have.
There are plenty of reasons to criticize musk, but not participating directly in a war isn’t one of them
SLS isn't insulating us from him. If anything I'd say it has the opposite effect. By spending the money on an obsolete and inferior system we're playing ourselves and making it more likely we become dependent on such a person.
Now if we took some lessons from the design or changed the rules of the game around SpaceX that might be different. But we're not making moves that help us in that department.
