[jltsiren]

Access to space is a vital enough national interest that it cannot be left to the whims of a single company. The alternative to giving money to the competitors would be installing a politruk in SpaceX and authorizing them to override any decision made by the company. Spending a few billion dollars a year inefficiently is probably preferable to that.

[lupusreal]

What you have here is a false dichotomy: Giving money to ULA or nationalizing SpaceX to penalize them for success.

Here's a third option: Give that money to Rocket Lab so they can develop their capabilities instead of giving it to ULA for their executives to snort it up their noses.

[jltsiren]

Public money goes to companies that can make plausible bids when the government has a need for some capability. For the Commercial Crew Program, that was in the early 2010s, when SpaceX was the upstart with a new unproven rocket. Rocket Lab has won some government contracts, but probably less than $1 billion in total, because it has been in serious business with big rockets only for a few years.