For better or worse, it kind of doesn't. Whether or not Artemis-1 falls won’t actually make much of a difference in the future of SLS, because the point of SLS is as much if not more for all the ‘other’ reasons [that we’ve talked about here] than the actual mission or its sustainability as a launch solution. What will kill SLS is a loss of appetite to fund those ‘other’ reasons. A launch anomaly on Artemis (or any future launch) may curb that appetite somewhat, but that will be a secondary influence. Anomalies simply get resolved and life moves on.
That's exactly right. Whether one prefers a particular development philosophy over another, it is inappropriate to draw equivalency between one SLS launch and one Starship launch. It is more accurate to draw equivalency between the first SLS launch and all Starship development launches (or at least the parts of those launches that are validating apples-to-apples items; obviously things like SS vetting of things like reusability elements are not applicable)
SLS is taking the proven path of hyper engineering a solution and not rushing any decisions like forcing a launch (as evidence by the past few weeks, contrary to what biased analyses want to suggest). History has shown this approach successful for many highly complex, very low volume gizmos, rockets especially. It is the antithesis of the fail fast and iterate approach that SX is taking, which of course has been proven [wildly] successful by all manner of companies across all manner of sectors.
