Ending the Space Launch System’s decades-long drain on the United States’ limited spaceflight budget should be a high priority during the transition from President Joe Biden to President-elect Donald Trump. Unfortunately, NASA’s giant rocket, decades in development but flown exactly once, is likely to survive the transition.
In its current form, SLS largely duplicates capacity available elsewhere at far lower cost. It consumes money and engineering resources that would better be spent developing improved deep space propulsion, building lunar bases, preparing for outposts on Mars, conducting mining experiments on asteroids, or on any other activity that would advance humanity’s space exploration goals.
For SLS opponents, all the stars finally seem to align. Most likely, Trump will continue to be an unpredictable leader, but one who likes an aggressive space program and prefers commercial development over government efforts. SLS is anything but aggressive and it is the antithesis of commerce. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, one of the chief donors and a key advisor to Trump’s campaign, is an advocate for commercial space and no friend of the SLS. He may be given great power in the administration to cut “government waste.” Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, is an entrepreneur who has financed two private human space missions on SpaceX Dragon capsules launched on Falcon 9s, and has two more in the pipeline, one of which may fly on Starship. He, too, may be expected to question the money spent on SLS.
Comparing costs
With some payload reconfiguration, Falcon Heavy could assemble most of the missions SLS would launch. By successfully flying 11 missions so far, the rocket has demonstrated great reliability and safety in flight. SLS is unlikely to be launched often enough to demonstrate comparable flight safety. Even SpaceX’s new rocket, Starship, has completed six partial test missions versus the lone SLS success to date. If SpaceX does manage to land an automated Starship on Mars during the next presidential term — a challenging but by no means impossible goal — it will become even harder to justify the billions spent rarely flying NASA’s lumbering giant.
SpaceX is a private company; outsiders do not know how much SpaceX is spending to develop Starship. However, in legal documents involving an environmental fight at the launch site, SpaceX argues Starship expenses are approximately $4 million per day. Using this as a proxy for the company’s burn rate, that equates to an annual expenditure of $1.46 billion. If so, that paid for four partially successful test flights in 2024, including the dramatic catch of the first stage by its launch tower — by any measure, an astonishing feat of engineering.
The SLS budget for 2024 was $3.2 billion, including ground systems and the Exploration upper stage. This paid for no test flights in 2024. SLS’ one test flight, which was largely successful, was in November 2022; the next is scheduled for 2026 at the earliest. It is hard to justify those expenditures for so low a flight rate.
Political battles
The rub is that SLS funding is not up to the president. It is up to Congress. Trump’s party has the narrowest of margins, and it is not at all clear that Congress — especially the Senate — will go along with any proposals to gut SLS. Historically, the legislative branches have added money to the program, and a number of SLS advocates were reelected in November.
Any attempt by Elon Musk to fight SLS will correctly be seen as a conflict of interests. SpaceX builds most of the current and near-term competition to SLS. Musk’s ownership of the company will provide ready ammunition for those who want SLS to survive, many of them Republicans.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy lift rocket is a little late to the party, but if successful, could launch reconfigured SLS payloads in the near future. Rocket Lab’s medium lift Newton is not far behind.
The chaotic nature of the first Trump administration is reasserting itself even before his second term has started. Successfully taking on a well entrenched and politically supported bureaucracy like NASA’s “rocket men” and killing SLS will take creativity and discipline.
It will also take persistence. Musk, who is not known for his patience, may enjoy being Trump’s “first buddy” at the moment, but Trump’s buddies have a habit of turning into first enemies, often in short order. SpaceX has grown too important to U.S. commercial and military power to follow its owner into any political doghouse, but signing on with a politician known for admiring authoritarian rulers is likely to prove a very dangerous game for Musk himself.
For SLS opponents, there is a far bigger problem than personnel issues. As much sense as doing away with SLS makes on paper, actually doing so would tear apart the delicate political and technical compromises that created the current Artemis plan for returning to Earth’s moon. That compromise architecture is grossly complex and produced the most expensive plan imaginable, but it is also a plan without serious opposition. It carefully preserves a job for every major faction. Commercial firms provide the landers. NASA’s rocket men are building SLS and the Orion capsule. Artemis even creates roles for advocates of space stations and, indirectly, automated space science.
In today’s society, severely fractured across both political and economic divides, Artemis may represent our last best hope of returning astronauts to Earth’s moon at all, let alone before China.
Perhaps the best way to look at the current presidential transition is to look beyond it. The advent of frequent and relatively low cost launch, ushered in by the Falcon 9, has resulted in a true renaissance in spaceflight; a successful Starship will continue and extend that revolution. SLS will become largely irrelevant, in much the way Falcon-9 has made most of its legacy competitors irrelevant.
No matter what happens politically and to the Artemis project, it is increasingly hard to see a place for NASA’s old way of doing business in that future — no matter how much money the U.S. wastes trying to preserve it past its time.
Donald F. Robertson is a retired space industry journalist. He is also a musician, playing percussion for Scottish dance bands.
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