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The one thing that I think starship has proven is that for any major mission that stretches our current launch capanilities, it may be worth investigating developing a new launch vehicle instead of accommodating the ones we have.

Just think of all the engineering and risk that’s going into a process that will be used once.

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I thought about this a lot while I was designing my own amateur liquid rocket. You would almost certainly save a lot of money across all launch programs from the payload, just by spending the effort upfront to qualify a new heavy lift system like a Saturn-VI or Starship.

I think its just such a difficult thing to justify huge upfront costs to congress, especially if you see how long it has taken SLS to get anywhere. IMO, ULA, Boeing (solo) and Northrop's cultures couldn't possibly cut it for developing another amazing vehicle at any appreciable speed without the Euphoria and meaning that the Space Race provided.

Good points. Sometimes projects need constraints to get moving.

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