Boeing Vice President David Dutcher warned workers on the company's Space Launch System (SLS) to prepare for layoffs on Friday if NASA finally cancels the rocket providing lift for the Artemis lunar program. The political fallout could make heads explode.
Eric Burger has the details on Dutcher's emergency all-hands meeting, but they aren't all that interesting. What is interesting is what happens when and if a team led by SpaceX founder Elon Musk tries to cancel a multibillion-dollar project led by Boeing.
Artemis is the U.S.-led international effort to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon, but to borrow a New England expression, we "can't get there from here" on the rocket built for the job —which is where DOGE's budget-cutting chops come in.
SLS isn't just a boring and stupid name for an impressively sized rocket; it's underpowered and too expensive for its intended mission. SLS can't put enough mass into lunar orbit to account for the Orion space capsule it carries and its four-person crew and their supplies. It doesn't even carry the landing vehicle.
To make up for SLS's shortcomings, we're going to build Lunar Gateway — an international space station in orbit around the moon. The plan is that Orion and its crew will dock at the Gateway and transfer to a SpaceX Human Landing System (HLS, and another boring name) for transit to the lunar surface, where they'll conduct their mission, and then back to the Gateway for transfer back to Orion for the voyage back to Earth. HLS gets to Lunar Gateway courtesy of a SpaceX Starship.
Did you get all that? There will be a quiz later.
The complexity is only necessary because SLS can't produce enough lift. Starship, once completed, can produce enough lift, making the Lunar Gateway and all that going back and forth unnecessary.
The Lunar Gateway is expected to cost $5.3 billion just for initial construction (and we both know what happens to those initial estimates; they go nowhere but up) and another billion dollars each year to operate and maintain.
Maybe there's a case to be made for Artemis to include an orbital substation, but it isn't Lunar Gateway.
A modified Starship could — not just in theory — do the same job the Lunar Gateway is supposed to do. Starship Gateway, or whatever you want to call it, could reach lunar orbit with a single launch and go to work immediately, no painstaking and dangerous orbital assembly required. Starship Gateway would have up to ten times (!!!) more habitable space than Lunar Gateway, and at a price measured in tens of millions instead of billions. (I assume operating and maintenance costs would be roughly the same, however.)
I'm not the first to propose using modified Starships for specialty missions, and, given the ship's size, affordability, and potential versatility, I won't be the last.
There is almost zero case for SLS and Lunar Gateway, and both ought to be canceled.
But these are merely practical considerations, and Washington is nothing if not ruinously impractical — so what about the political considerations? Before I get to those — and they are vital — you have to understand what's at stake with the Space Launch System, the massive rocket powering the stupid, impractical, and ultimately unnecessary part of the Artemis program.
SLS is a Frankenrocket, cobbled together out of parts new and old. Its most innovative feature is taking fully reusable Space Shuttle engines — cutting-edge technology from the 1970s — and throwing them into the ocean after each launch. It's a beast designed by Congress (not by engineers) to please contractors spread out in dozens of conveniently located congressional districts.
Each SLS launch costs a little over $4 billion, not including roughly $25 billion in development costs. SpaceX's goal is to get the cost of a Starship launch down to $2 million, but even if they're off by an order of magnitude, each Starship launch will do much more than any SLS launch at a tiny fraction of the cost.
And the SLS part of Artemis can't work without Starship, anyway. It's madness. But it's madness with five million tons of thrust political support.
The primary SLS contractors are Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, United Launch Alliance, and (via the Orion space capsule) Lockheed-Martin. Compared to SpaceX's launch cadence, those companies are major lobbying firms that dabble in putting things into space.
Their lobbyists are going to scream bloody murder when and if Elon Musk, their chief rival, recommends taking away their multibillion-dollar iron rice bowls. They will not go quietly into that good night, and the Legacy Mainstream Media — no strangers to ripping off taxpayers, we've learned — will play along.
I'd be happy to be wrong about the political fallout because that would mean that America is again serious about expanding humanity's reach to Luna, Mars, and beyond.
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