Sell the SLS/Artemis/Orion program to me

[Tyndmyr]

I don't care who sent it, I care about what and more importantly who gets to space (to orbit at minimum, I'm not counting tourists who might as well be under weather balloons).

If the tourism doesn't count, then the suborbital weapon shots definitely don't count.

I'd put some exploration value on reliably sustaining people in space, though. Yeah, it probably shouldn't count as much as a space station mission or putting stuff into orbit...and counting higher orbits as worth more than lower orbits is reasonable, because it requires a lot more work to get them there. Mass to LEO is a decentish point of standardization, because anything that can deliver x pounds to Mars can deliver many times that to LEO.

Point of order, the international space station is not "our" space station. It is a joint venture between the US, Canada, the EU, Japan, and the Russian Federation. I know there are specifically Russian modules, built and launched by them, just as there are modules and astronauts from the other players. I know that recent world events have called the arrangement into question, with the Russians threatening to stop resupplying or transferring western astronauts to/from orbit with their Progress rockets, forcing us to rely solely on the SpaceX missions. That threat seems to have died away for the moment, perhaps because all players realize they have more to lose by such an action than to gain.

That is certainly true, and with the loss of the shuttle, USG contributions to the ISS dropped off, relying on other partners or SpaceX. That's a good argument for replacing the shuttle.

Composition of the ISS is eight US modules, six Russian modules, two Japanese modules, and one European module. All of them are valuable, but say, the EU module would not make a good station on its own, whereas the ISS would be completely fine with the loss of the modules. Only the US and Russia possess the ability to make a functional, albeit smaller station out of their own modules. Splitting would definitely hinder a lot of the science, though. I don't think the astronauts on any side want to do that, it's purely other considerations.

If one divided it up by nation that lifted a component to space, it is far more one sided, with only a handful of missions being non US. The EU's module, for instance, was lifted via US Shuttle. For larger components, a lot of rockets simply don't have the space in the fairing for a payload of that size. That's one of the big reasons to be excited for the SpaceX Starship. It's got the largest fairing space yet, so it allows us to construct larger modules.

The ISS is the best station around, but we'll eventually need a successor, I think. At least some gravity seems necessary for a long stay, so we'll probably need it to have some spin if we want people to live there longer term. Astronauts have to work pretty hard to maintain condition adequately for even a short ISS stay.