Boeing has notified its Space Launch System (SLS) team of potential layoffs, a worrying sign that NASA’s lunar rocket could be in jeopardy after significant cost overruns and schedule delays.
The company expects to cut about 400 positions by April 2025 “due to a review of the Artemis program and cost expectations,” Boeing said in an email. “We are working with our customer and looking for opportunities to redeploy employees across the company to minimize job losses and retain our talented team members.”
The 5.75 million pound SLS rocket, equipped with a Boeing-made main stage, is essential to NASA‘s Artemis-Moon program. The SLS launched on November 16, 2022 for the Artemis 1 mission, which is to deliver the unmanned Orion spacecraft around the Moon and back. The rocket is scheduled to launch the next mission, Artemis 2, in April 2026 with the crew aboard Orion and to make the first lunar landing since Apollo, Artemis 3, sometime in 2027.
However, NASA’s massive lunar rocket has become a real budget nightmare. NASA’s Office of Inspector General conducted an audit from February 2022 to April 2023 and found that the space agency’s total investment in the Artemis Moon program from 2012 to 2025 will reach $93 billion, of which the SLS alone accounts for $23.8 billion spent through 2022. That’s $6 billion more than the cost of the rocket, in addition to a six-year schedule delay that exceeds NASA’s original projections, the report said.
Another OIG report published in August 2024 criticized Boeing’s “ineffective quality management and inexperienced personnel, continued cost and schedule growth, and delay in establishing a cost and schedule baseline” for the SLS research upper stage. The upper stage was scheduled to be delivered to NASA in early 2021, but is now projected to be completed no earlier than 2027.
The current administration does not seem to be a fan of the Artemis program either. “The Artemis architecture is grossly inefficient because it is a program that maximizes jobs, not maximizes results,” SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk, who is a close adviser to President Donald Trump, recently wrote in a blog post on X. “We need something completely new.”
During his inaugural speech, Trump did not mention the Moon, but instead spoke of “launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” Elon Musk has also set his sights on Mars, hoping to land the SpaceX Starship megaship on the Red Planet’s surface by 2026. This would put Starship years ahead of NASA’s plan to use the Moon as a testing ground for landing astronauts on Mars sometime in the 2030s.
Depending on how you feel about the SLS, the potential layoffs at Boeing are either a worrisome or positive sign of where NASA’s massive rocket is after one trip to the moon.
