It's difficult to imagine any scenario where this happens. The only real possibilities are SpaceX going bankrupt or leaving the country. In either case, the government has substantial capacity to nationalize companies for the sake of national security during times of crises. It's also likely impossible for SpaceX to leave the US owing to ITAR and other regulations.
I'm sure SpaceX would be more than willing to sign a non-exclusive no-minimums fixed-price-per-launch (based on mass/orbit/etc) indefinite contract for any types of missions the SLS could hope to do. This type of contract isn't even new to NASA (or SpaceX), it's just the policy says "competition" like SLS has to exist and be funded too.
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.
Well, I mean it's unlikely but hear me out, what if SpaceX were actually run by a rogue trillionaire and the country were run by another rogue billionaire and they didn't get along?
Twenty years ago, would you have thought the religious right would accept a serial philanderer former Democrat from NYC whose favorite Bible verse is “Two Corinthians” as their idol?
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)
You just have to say something something national security and they will fall in line. Modeling politics on people or groups of people having principles is way outdated, and it’s questionable whether it ever was accurate.
Corporate interests are not a homogenous, a single block.
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.
Falcon Heavy as a TLI payload of 16,800kg. A fully decked Orion spacecraft weighs 33,446kg. Really the only alternative to SLS for Artemis would be Starship but that hasn't even achieved orbit yet (meanwhile SLS already did a successful lunar orbit and return).
I’m not happy with this argument because the Orion comes in two modules. It’s designed to go in SLS but each module separately can be launched by Falcon Heavy.
In view of the launch economics, this argument still doesn’t make sense of SLS.
>but each module separately can be launched by Falcon Heavy.
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.
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.
Huh, I overestimated SLS? My bad - I think I must have used Block 2 numbers by accident. Thanks for the correction.
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?
