"Some people" in this care are the Competitive Space Task Force, a "coalition of leading conservative and libertarian thinkers from organizations committed to creating a free and competitive market for U.S. spaceflight". As one would expect from an organization with that particular point of view, they believe the SLS is a complete boondoggle and private industry should do the work.
I wish there were a more neutral source of information. The best I have found is Wikipedia, which obviously has its own limitations. Bill Nye is for it, the Planetary Society was against it, but is no longer against it.
I don't know. Why it is necessary for US taxpayers to pay for this OR subsidize companies like SpaceX is a mystery to me. Spend the money on something that will have a greater impact on the lives of those paying the bill.
NASA paid SpaceX & OSC in advance to produce cost-effective vehicles that NASA then bought. Paying in advance to create new products like this is a standard commercial transaction, and it saved NASA a lot of money compared to buying what was already available, according to NASA.
Sounds like you don't want to fund space at all, but that's a different discussion.
It's not even unique. NASA didn't even build the F-5 rocket engines that sent men to the Moon; Rocketdyne did. That's the way government contracting has pretty much always worked. The government typically does a bunch of R&D work, and works with commercial companies to actually build things, especially in quantity.
I wish there were a more neutral source of information. The best I have found is Wikipedia, which obviously has its own limitations. Bill Nye is for it, the Planetary Society was against it, but is no longer against it.
I don't know. Why it is necessary for US taxpayers to pay for this OR subsidize companies like SpaceX is a mystery to me. Spend the money on something that will have a greater impact on the lives of those paying the bill.