China appears to be accelerating development of a super-heavy lift rocket

Both the BFR and the New Armstrong, based on what is currently known about them, will be able to lift something better than the ISS (e.g. a Bigelow habitat) to orbit in a single launch for considerably less than either ISS or SLS.

ULA don't have any heavy lift rockets in the class of SLS in the works, and the only contracts to do so would come from NASA anyway, so there's no competition to SLS coming from that quarter.

Of course Falcon Heavy is squarely in the same class as SLS, but even there payloads being developed for SLS right now probably can't be easily adapted to BFR, so SLS will still have a role to play at least for a while.

As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I still yearn wistfully for the space race's unity and determination of purpose.

It's hardly appropriate for HN, but I wonder how differently the world would look if NASA had received a much larger budget. Probably taken from the US Military's allocation, how much would the loss of half of the US Navy have affected world politics and conflicts? Or what would the USA look like without the Iraq war of 2003 onward?

(I'm trying to be as neutral as possible in my language here, I don't want to start a flamewar about US and geopolitics!)

I doubt we'd have gotten further into space as some of us would like, but I do think we'd have already proven that asteroid mining can work, and some people would be living multi-year tenures on the Moon. Whether we'd have bootstrapped our way to mining and using nuclear materials in space is doubtful, but certainly possible. (in other words, building nuclear rockets that have never been close to Earth's biosphere, which would open up large parts of the Solar System for human exploration)

This is when the government had a vision and the nation had a collective aspiration. Now we can't even imagine such a thing. Politicians have no vision and there is no collective aspiration or national goal. Politicians get elected so that they can be the ones who benefit from influence peddling and not somebody else. I can only imagine what we could accomplish today if there was a vision for doing so given todays technology.

That's why as stupid as it is, this rivalry between the US and China might actually trigger something. It's sad that close-mindedness prevents meaningful collaboration, but if an Us vs Them mentality is what it takes to make leaps then it might be worth it.

That makes sense. I guess with enough money we could develop a rocket much faster.

One piece of evidence may be to look at the falcon series. I wouldn't say they slowed development of the series so that they could use their older, already established versions. In fact, they designed block 5 to be even better on re-usability, which would increase profit margins by decreasing cost of refurbishment. At the same time, they rendered many of their pending falcon heavy flights unnecessary, as they continually incrementally improved the falcon's payload capacity and thrust. If anything, that may have been a boon economically, because using FH for those same launches would require waiting many additional months to receive that revenue.

So, overall, I'd say SpaceX specifically was pushing towards better margin products pro-actively, rather than dragging their feet on R&D to milk an older cash cow.

Both rockets and knives are tools. Granted, rockets had more money to back up the military intent instead of scientific or exploratory, but at least they're here for the curious to use and not just for the generals.