>>13586088Congress will never be appalled by the price, because 60% of the cost of any flight system derived non-commercially, is funding to pay for STEM and STEM-related jobs in those state sectors, specifically to maintain capacity and retain talent for large scale production. The issue is that this entire horizontally integrated production model around government backed aerospace operates on the premise that all this production will need to one day switch over, snap of fingers, into building more ICBMs to nuke the Russians or the Chinese when WWIII breaks out.
The primary purpose of SLS isn't jobs, nor is it a rocket to take 100T to LEO or 30T to the Moon or ANYTHING AT ALL related to space. Its a front for "we need emergency capacity to nuke the Russians and Chinese and this is a good way to hide that fact, because the constituency is stupid and can be distracted by glamour of Moon and Mars."
The reason why Congress is panicking with SpaceX, is because SpaceX is pulling that veil back and pointing that out. "In the 21st century, we're not doing anything sci-fi magic. We're just bringing things in house and the sheer efficiency gained by having a mission and vertical integration, is pushing us a decade ahead of the rest. That's it. THAT'S FUCKING IT GUYS."
Also remember that majority of congressmen and women are in their 60s and 70s, some of them are up there in their 80s and 90s. ALL THEY KNOW and LIVE BY is the idea that Russia and China are gonna lob nukes and we need to prepare for the day inevitable when this happens, so we can lob 10x more back. They're all still operating on MAD principles, while remaining ignorant either due to age or out of convenience, that the nature of warfare has changed. That no sane leader is going to lob nukes in war, and that their purpose is only as deterrent against actions that aren't desired.
Notice how we only sanction Russia, China, or North Korea? That we don't bomb them like we do the middle east? Why is that? Nukes
