> If there's significant overlap with ICBMs I could see it being reasonable from the perspective of maintaining military production readiness.
In the US this is partly historical. The Shuttle style large solids have no practical military application.
In general, I think by now the technology has diverged quite a bit as the requirements for launching potentially humans and ICBMs is quite different. I don't know how closely the technologies are still linked between the solids used on rockets like Vulcan and ICBMs.
In France this is certainty the case for example.
> major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly.
Lets hope we don't need to rapidly ramp up production of ICBMs since they are mostly just used to carry nukes.
If you think its politically necessary to fund that infrastructure just do so with your military budget. Tying down other space activities, specially civilian, is a bad idea.
> In the US this is partly historical. The Shuttle style large solids have no practical military application.
The huge Space Shuttle SRBs were never an ICBM part themselves. The military angle enters the picture when you realize the SRB fuel is the same fuel used in ICBMs, made by the same company (originally Thiokol, then ATK, which merged with Orbital Sciences to form Orbital ATK, which was then purchased by Northrop Grumman.)
In the US this is partly historical. The Shuttle style large solids have no practical military application.
In general, I think by now the technology has diverged quite a bit as the requirements for launching potentially humans and ICBMs is quite different. I don't know how closely the technologies are still linked between the solids used on rockets like Vulcan and ICBMs.
In France this is certainty the case for example.
> major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly.
Lets hope we don't need to rapidly ramp up production of ICBMs since they are mostly just used to carry nukes.
If you think its politically necessary to fund that infrastructure just do so with your military budget. Tying down other space activities, specially civilian, is a bad idea.