[philwelch]

> NASA needs to keep in house rocketry expertise and the US government cannot rely on private companies 100% just for like NatSec reasons

Do they? Most national security work in space is under NRO and USSF, not NASA; neither of them build their own rockets but instead rely on commercial vendors.

The Army doesn't build its own rifles or tanks, the Air Force doesn't build their own fighters and bombers, and the Navy doesn't build their own ships. Operations is different from designing equipment; the only time it makes sense for the same organization to do both is when that organization is so far out on the cutting edge of innovation that they have to do both. (Ironically it's SpaceX that is in this position with regard to Starlink.)

NASA was in this position during the Apollo era. They aren't in this position anymore. It should have been a hint as early as the Shuttle era when they went and designed the Shuttle as (among other things) a satellite launch platform, only for commercial vendors to provide unmanned rockets as satellite launch platforms instead. As it stands now, NASA carries out a lot of scientific missions that don't have an immediate commercial application, which is a good thing for them to do but doesn't require them to design their own rockets.

Furthermore, it's not even fair to describe SLS as "in-house", since it's built by Boeing and Boeing is bidding the system for their own commercial contracts now. At that point it's just a question of which private company the government can rely on.