Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

Has taken DoD contracts != actively makes missiles and fighter jets IMO

Not without a warhead. Either way my point was that the shuttle was built by contractors and private companies, not govt employees. The only difference here is a company that isn't actively building weapons

And really at this point the alternative is giving money to the Russian govt, which... folks have feelings about

You could take the money that was given to SpaceX for commercial crew and spend it on SLS instead. You'd increase the SLS budget from ~$20B to ~$23B. And really all you're doing is giving money to Boeing instead of SpaceX. And you end up with an LV that costs 5-10x per launch

(The commercial crew budget includes the actual costs of the launch, SLS is just development costs). I don't see that as hobbling your space program, just having the company building the rockets manage the launch instead of contracting parts out and integrating yourself

The problem is that NASA is optimized to employ as many contractors as possible. And congress wants it that way, and dictates their funding to continue making that the case. When you combine that with a potential dramatic shift in goals every 4-8 years, this path makes sense