Boeing informed its Space Launch System (SLS) team of potential layoffs, a worrying sign that NASA’s Moon rocket may be at risk after massive cost overruns and schedule delays. And also Trump.
The company is expecting approximately 400 fewer positions by April 2025 “to align with revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations,” Boeing told Gizmodo in an email. “We are working with our customer and seeking opportunities to redeploy employees across our company to minimize job losses and retain our talented teammates.”
The 5.75-million-pound SLS rocket, powered by a Boeing-built core stage, is essential to NASA’s Artemis Moon program. SLS launched on November 16, 2022 for the Artemis 1 mission, sending an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon and back. The rocket is due to launch a follow-up mission, Artemis 2, in April 2026, with a crew on board Orion, and the first crewed Moon landing since Apollo, Artemis 3, sometime in 2027.
NASA’s massive Moon rocket, however, has become a budgeting nightmare. NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) performed an audit from February 2022 through April 2023, finding that the space agency’s overall investment in its Artemis Moon program is projected to reach $93 billion from 2012 through 2025, of which the costs of SLS alone represent $23.8 billion spent through 2022. That’s $6 billion in cost increases for the rocket, in addition to six years in schedule delays above NASA’s original projections, the report stated.
Another OIG report released in August 2024 criticized “Boeing’s ineffective quality management and inexperienced workforce, continued cost increases and schedule delays, and the delayed establishment of a cost and schedule baseline,” regarding the SLS rocket’s Exploration Upper Stage. The upper stage was scheduled to be delivered to NASA in early 2021 but its development is now projected to be complete no earlier than 2027.
The current administration does not seem to be a fan of the Artemis program either. “The Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient, as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program,” SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk, who is a close advisor to President Donald Trump, recently wrote on X. “Something entirely new is needed.”
During his inauguration speech, Trump didn’t mention the Moon, but instead spoke of “launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Musk also has his eyes on Mars, hoping to land SpaceX’s megarocket Starship on the surface of the Red Planet by 2026. That would put Starship years ahead of NASA’s plan to use the Moon as a testbed for landing astronauts on Mars sometime in the 2030s.
Depending on where you stand on SLS, Boeing’s potential layoffs are either a worrying or welcome sign of where NASA’s massive rocket stands after just one trip to the Moon.
