> Surely someone as smart as Elon will find a way to distribute starship production to please the wonderful members of US Congress - he does plan on building a lot of them.

All indications point towards the opposite - that he considers low cost and high performance to be more important, and that vertical integration is an important part of achieving both of those goals.

While it's true that SpaceX is doing work in CA, FL, and TX, there's not much indication that they'll be farming out subcomponent work to high-40s number of states ala the Shuttle/SLS.

I don't think there's any way to do that without drastically increasing costs and, more importantly, slowing down SpaceX's ability to iterate on their designs.