Well then there would be less money for things like PACE, ICE-SAT, ICE Bridge. They've been building earth satellites to improve fisheries management and inform earth conservation efforts. PACE will be particularly helpful for me as an oceanographer because of they've got those neato optical plankton sensors onboard.
Also, NASA allocates funding based on decadal surveys of the scientific community, so they have really considered doing as you propose.
Or, there would be less money for SLS. NASA has been spending $2 billion annually for SLS development for a while now, and all they'll get is a disposable rocket the size of Starship that costs at least a billion dollars per launch, or $10,000/kg payload.
Meanwhile SpaceX is spending less than one billion dollars total for Starship/Super Heavy, and at scale it'll launch payload for $20/kg. How much more money would NASA have for observation satellites with $20/kg launch?
Probably even more than you'd think because when launch is cheap, you can also afford to make your satellite cheaper. If it fails, it's not so expensive to launch another one.
That's strange. Why is NASA doing sls instead of just contracting SpaceX? From your comment it sounds like SpaceX is much more efficient at launching things into space than NASA, and I'd like to know how that came to be the case.
Good: NASA started SLS years ago, and had no idea that SpaceX would be so successful. They also didn't know SLS would take as much time and money as it has.
Bad: NASA is at the mercy of Congress and SLS has a lot of political support. It spreads jobs over a lot of districts and pays big money to major defense contractors. At this point it's a huge sunk cost and embarrassing to cancel.
Ugly: Those contractors work on cost-plus contracts so they have little incentive to make a cheap launcher. To illustrate, the SLS uses Space Shuttle main engines, which cost several times as much per unit thrust as the Saturn V's engines. That was worthwhile for the Shuttle since it reused them. Naturally, NASA's contractors thought they were perfect engines to throw away on every flight.
By funding science they’ve actually held science back because the costs of access to space have not decreased. You can do a lot more science when the costs are low.
How many billions upon billions upon billions did NASA waste on the Space Shuttle. NASA would be able to fund a hundred times their current projects if they’d simply kept the Saturn, never mind if they’d invested in reusable vehicles.
Also, NASA allocates funding based on decadal surveys of the scientific community, so they have really considered doing as you propose.