> Second, you need redundancy.

No you don't. Just as there was no redundancy for Saturn V. As there is not for Falcon Heavy. There was no redundancy for Delta 4 Heavy. There is always a largest rocket.

And if you do need redundancy, SLS is not how you would get there.

If Starship doesn't work, then there will simply be no moon landing. Period.

> Iirc, NASA is trying to shift SLS production to the private sector, to try and "get rid" of this ugly duckling.

That is just contract mombo jumbo that changes nothing about the actual project.

Once it becomes Somebody Else's Problem, and not NASA's, then NASA can quietly abandon it. Since nobody else will want to pay for even a single launch, it may then die a final death.

> Once it becomes Somebody Else's Problem, and not NASA's, then NASA can quietly abandon it

No, what happens is that you create a seriously powerful group of private institutions that will go full force into lobbying congress to not kill the project. Even more so then now.

What you describe is the present condition.

No, now you have many private groups with slightly different interest temporarly unified. Once you create one gigantic mega contractor, that group has a much more specific and target interested in lobbying for that one specific program.

In other words, no worse than the present condition.

But it would be increasingly awkward for Congress to be seen to force NASA to choose the $2B launcher from vendor A over the $10M or $50M (or whatever) launcher from vendor B.