Unfortunately objectively good things like space exploration and settlement are being seen more negativity because these days they are being talked about by Musk. Yes Musk is grifter, but space is genuinely 100% worth pursuing.

As much as I dislike Musk I don't agree with this point. There will always be problems that need to be fixed on Earth. Thankfully we can do multiple things at the same time and settling space is one of those things. Humanity will not survive long term without it.

I used to be apathetic towards SpaceX, at least the company itself, since the fanbase is one of the most toxic. Then Starlink came about and now they are pushing this AI techbro crap and it is making me actively dislike them more and more. I hope it all crumbles and fails, the sooner the better!

...even if the pure hardware marginal cost is much less. The solution is to put more payloads on it and have more vehicles being built at the same time, thus increasing the flight rate. Even going from 1/yr to 2/yr launch cadence would nearly halve the cost per launch. Now imagine 4 or 6 per year.

The main reason it is so bad in cost and cadence is because its launch manifest is so sparse. There is A LOT of overhead cost associated with NASA launch vehicles. If you tell your contractors to build and fly once a year those billions in overhead cost are only going into one rocket...

A lot of the criticism of SLS is borne out of comparison with commercial launch vehicles, when the comparison is meaningless. Compared to previous NASA rockets it's not bad. No other rocket can do what it does, and even if one could, the national space program shouldn't be controlled by billionaires

No other rocket can do what it does. Government rockets have always been more expensive, but if that's the price to pay for a space program not owned by billionaires, that is more than worth it IMO. Still MUCH cheaper to operate than the Apollo program.

Of course they are repeating the same inflated cost estimates for the RS-25 engine...
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Should be noted that the Artemis 1 heat shield worked just fine, the issue was that the ablation pattern wasn't quite what models had predicted. So they had to make sure that their models and testing data matched what was observed in flight and could make accurate predictions for future missions

Specifically their investigation determined that the existing heat shield hardware with a shorter entry sequence was good to go for Artemis 2. On Artemis 3 or 4 they will probably make minor changes to the hardware itself but that's TBD.

You can't fully test an ECLSS system without crew on board. Pretty much every new crewed spacecraft does this. Besides, they'll spend about a day in Earth orbit to make sure it works okay. If not they can easily return home. The heat shield issue was investigated and has been addressed.

The heat shield issue was resolved about 9 months ago. There was a lot of talk about that at the time, regarding the mechanism and why they think they have resolved it.

I'd argue human space exploration is one of the most important things we will do this century, it is certainly worthy of the pennies on the dollar the US spends on it. The long term future of humanity is at stake, we either spread through the universe or Earth will become our eventual tomb.

Let's do all of those things AND go to the Moon!
This is barely a blip of US federal funding.