The legacy aerospace giants scored a victory on Tuesday when the U.S. Senate passed President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill that allocates billions of dollars to NASA‘s flagship Artemis program.
The addition of $10 billion to the Artemis architecture, which includes funding for additional Space Launch System rockets and a lunar orbital station called Gateway, is a response to critics who would like to see alternative technologies instead. Among those critics are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacson, whom Musk has nominated to be the next NASA administrator.
There is no indication that the relationship between Musk and Trump is recovering. If Trump signs the bill, the conflict that began after the president’s sudden withdrawal of Isaacman’s nomination is likely to continue, if not intensify.
Musk, in particular, has targeted the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on the grounds that it is fully expendable. Unlike SpaceX’s family of rockets, which are designed to be reusable, the SLS is only designed to be used once. As Musk said in 2020, this means that with each launch, “a billion-dollar rocket is blown up.” Even that may be an understatement; according to the latest data from NASA’s watchdog organization, current production costs are approaching $2.5 billion for each rocket.
To date, about $24 billion has been invested in the production of the SLS, and these funds have largely gone to a consortium of aerospace leaders including Boeing, L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Northrop Grumman, which is leading the construction of the rocket’s major components.
During his recent Senate hearing, Isakman questioned the huge sums involved. He confirmed the use of the SLS for the next two Artemis missions, but ultimately said he did not believe the rocket was “a long-term way to get to the moon and back, and to Mars with great frequency.”
Congress – and Trump, if he decides to sign the bill – have decided to move forward. About $4.1 billion of the $10 billion added to the document will go to additional SLS rockets for the Artemis 4 and 5 missions. Meanwhile, about $2.6 billion will be used to complete the construction of the Gateway station.
Notably, the President’s budget request for NASA for the next fiscal year submitted in May proposed “phasing out the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft after the completion of the Artemis III mission. This new funding contradicts the proposal that was submitted before Musk and Trump publicly criticized each other in June.
The new funding includes $700 million for a new Mars telecommunications orbiter, $1.25 billion for additional International Space Station operations, and $325 million for SpaceX to develop a spacecraft to de-orbiter the ISS at the end of the decade. (The total contract for the development of the ISS de-orbiter is $843 million.)
