> Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive.
As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1].
> And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.
Not for SLS... but for SpaceX with Starship. The USSF plans a demo flight for 2026 [2]. And militarily, this capacity is definitely worth it. 100 tons of cargo, delivered to any place in the world that has a suitable landing facility in one hour of flight time. There's absolutely nothing that can come close to this kind of logistic capability, and there is no competitor in sight. It would be an absolute edge over Russia, China or anyone else who thinks they can wage war against the US or whomever the US thinks is worthy enough of its protection.
While I agree this will be a major boon for SpaceX because military gonna military, in realistic terms it's far from a game changer. ICBMs are tough to shoot down because of their high speed and small size. Starship, by contrast, is huge and will need to slow down much more when reentering the atmosphere. It would be a sitting duck.
For proxy and "we're not involved in this war, honest" type stuff, that might be acceptable so long as target is nowhere near peer. But in any war against a peer military power including Russia/China, they'd have about as much use as aircraft carriers - which is to say, basically none. This, btw, is the major problem with war logistics in general. It's not the speed, because throughput matters much more than latency anyhow, but vulnerability.
As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1].
> And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.
Not for SLS... but for SpaceX with Starship. The USSF plans a demo flight for 2026 [2]. And militarily, this capacity is definitely worth it. 100 tons of cargo, delivered to any place in the world that has a suitable landing facility in one hour of flight time. There's absolutely nothing that can come close to this kind of logistic capability, and there is no competitor in sight. It would be an absolute edge over Russia, China or anyone else who thinks they can wage war against the US or whomever the US thinks is worthy enough of its protection.
[1] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/watchdog-report-blasts-us-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Cargo