Even weirder to pooh-pooh government funded concept studies when SpaceX is literally the poster company for governments chucking money at private enterprises to

Even weirder to pooh-pooh government funded concept studies when SpaceX is literally the poster company for governments chucking money at private enterprises to come up with innovative new solutions to variants of space problems with already existent solutions (after a decade and three orders of magnitude more funding) Not only is the requirement highly unlike LEO satellites, but members of both consortiums have satellite tech of their own (which is arguably both more mature and more relevant to the requirements than Starlink) Just as well nobody decided it wasn't worth NASA wasting money evaluating the PayPal guy's ideas when off the shelf space tech existed, though...