How about as a backup in case all other current options are unavailable?
I don't believe that likely, but it does seem like something similar is a good reason to keep options open.
The two main stated aims of fostering competition are contingencies for any single provider and hopes that funding competition lowers cost in the long term (which is separate from preventing cost from going up). I used to be much more supportive of this policy... but nowadays I find myself on the fence. It's hard for me to believe however many billions of dollars we funnel into SLS per launch will ever result in cheap alternatives being developed. It may even have the opposite effect of "SLS got funded through all of its overruns on this policy, we should have no problems doing it again". On the contingency side it's a bit harder to navigate... but it's starting to feel like programs like SLS don't produce realistic alternatives anyways so how much of a contingency is it really providing to fund things like that.
There is absolutely no company that is actually "too big to fail".
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/spacex-to-invest-2-billion-into-elo...
Money is powerful, but never under-estimate the power of having the coercive apparatus of state at someone's hand.
Both from the Republican base, to whom government is anathema and private industry the best.
And to corporate interests supporting the Republican Party.
Want to see where the real power is? Follow the political money.
The Republican base doesn’t actually care about the things they claim to.
What’s being said now is more important than what someone historically said, as long as the current messaging is consistent. (And opponents have been eliminated)
From time to time, it is very well known that a group of vultures organizes themselves to capture the State and royally fuck another vulture using the State's power and legitimacy.
Yeah, money have a lot of power, but a lot of money's power is contingent on the existence of the repressive apparatus of State. Don't discount the power of a charismatic populist leader (And I am not talking about Trump) or a political genius.
People thought that the oligarchs in Russia would overthrow Putin as soon as they felt the bite of sanctions on their backs. The only thing that got thrown were the oligarchs who didn't with the program, and didn't dance to the tune Mr. Putin was playing. And when I say thrown, I meant it literally, as in defenestrated from a high rise window.
If there was a genuine possibility of SLS being competitive, that's one thing. It's another when it's worse in basically every way.
In view of the launch economics, this argument still doesn’t make sense of SLS.
How do you know that they can feasibly be launched separately? Do you think NASA would have asked for a launch vehicle the size of SLS if could have done a manned lunar mission with something less then half its size?
Saturn V was less powerful than SLS - but it could send an entire mission in a single launch. Capsule, lander and all.
A lot of what NASA has been doing with SLS is just trying to... rationalize its existence. This is what gave us NRHO, Gateway and others.
Reportedly, some of the people at NASA just believe that having an inefficient, wasteful and corrupt space program is better than not having it.
That's just not true. Saturn V had a paylod of 43,500kg to TLI. Only the largest configuration of SLS(Block 2) exceeds that with 46000kg. A Falcon Heavy is far below that.
My point stands though: no Artemis mission has plans to launch a full Apollo style capsule + lander stack. Artemis HLS, SpaceX and Blue Origin versions both, flies entirely on its own. So what's required of both SLS and any would-be SLS replacement is a far less demanding mission than what Saturn V has done in the past.
Which calls into question: what SLS is even for? Does it add value to the mission, or is the mission subtracted from to justify adding SLS to it?