Damn! My thinking of "why not both?" when it comes to SLS vs Starship is being seriously tested by such figures. $4 billion per launch seems pretty eye-watering even by space money standards.
It's worse than that. Over the past 20 years NASA has spent/wasted $46B on various rocket programs (Constellation -> SLS -> Artemis), all massively over budget and late. Before it was cancelled, Constellation's schedule was slipping at more than one year per year!
NASA once had a clear job: beat the Rooskis to the Moon. But since then, lumbered with a bloated Apollo-era physical infrastructure, and by a space-industrial-legislative complex that is interested only in terrestrial pork, and actually quite indifferent to achieving anything in space, NASA has become directionless. It seems to me that if SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc not emerged, in the end NASA would have effectively ground to halt, its budget being consumed on static self-maintenance ( a "self-licking ice cream cone", as described in the below).
If (if) Starship works, then I can imagine that SpaceX will tire of government sluggishness, and just go to the Moon independently, which should cause some ructions in Washington.
I'm reading Escaping Gravity by ex-NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver. If you're a space fan, it's pretty interesting. The levels of inertia, backstabbing, cronyism and factionalism she describes are mind-boggling. It's amazing anything ever got off the ground.
Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age eBook : Lori Garver: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
www.amazon.co.uk
i only managed to get a partial pic of this, bit this is what moves Artimis into place. It moves at one mile an hour and has to travel about seven miles from the hangar to the launch site.
