But SLS is in no way able to go to moon or earth with what they are currently building?
What makes this so weird to me is that SpaceX does have Dragon already which just brought more people into orbit this week - e.g. proven and way cheaper of what SLS is supposed to do in this mission - unless I'm missing or not understanding something.
So you're right the starship portion to moon (and hopefully mars) is similar to SLS in that it's not realized ye
But looking at the part SLS is supposed to play in this production, that role has already been acted successfully by Dragon. I'd say spacex gets the space oscar for it, though i doubt they get the trophy this weekend :)
Orion basically is ready. There is an uncrewed full stack test flight around the Moon scheduled for November this year, Artemis I. Decent chance it will slip by a few months, but still highly likely to happen by early next year. And then in 2023 they have planned a crewed test flight (orbiting the Moon but not landing, like Apollo 8).
I think SpaceX wants to focus as much of their development resources as possible on Starship. They'd rather focus their energies on that rather than on coming up with new versions of Crew Dragon. Starship, if successful, is going to kill SLS/Orion in the medium-to-long term. I don't think there is any great benefit to SpaceX in trying to kill it in the short-term. That'd be walking into a potentially expensive and risky political battle with vested interests in Congress, and why get them offside when doing so isn't on your critical path to your ultimate goal?
Starship itself?.. Being built with such technologies, so cheap (Elon mentioned that Boca Chica works are quite small percents of what SpaceX is doing in terms of money), so fast - and yet we already have a successful-ish landing from ~10 km height.
Of course, we don't know for sure. But it surely doesn't seem too bad, especially now - and for some it was clear when SpaceX was just created.
Also considering the planned SLS "landing" mode they are also on par so far.
I'm no fan of SLS, but check your terminology here: You're talking about Starship in the present tense, but it hasn't launched _either_, so you can't say it "can" go to the moon etc either.
Starship is awesome, but it's an insanely ambitious project. No one knows how long it'll take to get it right.