By Joey Roulette and Bo Erickson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump is being urged to axe an over-budget, multi-billion dollar moon rocket, sources familiar with the discussions said, setting up a titanic struggle with Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on the program’s jobs.
Six space industry representatives advising Elon Musk, the billionaire SpaceX CEO with a tight grip on U.S. space policy, and Trump have told Reuters they want NASA’s $24 billion Space Launch System (SLS) program canceled or at least phased out over several years, eyeing what has long been a major cost burden on the agency – but a crucial pillar of its moon program.
Scaling back the SLS, which is being developed by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, could offer a boost to Musk’s SpaceX, which is developing its own cheaper, albeit less powerful rocket called Falcon Heavy.
Employing 28,000 workers across roughly 44 U.S. states, SLS, which launched for the first time in 2022 after years of development delays, is one of a few space programs Musk and Trump’s pick to head NASA, Jared Isaacman, have criticized as an overpriced vestige of outdated rocket technology. Musk has said SLS “makes me feel sad.”
Cancelling SLS could be a major litmus test for Trump and Musk’s effort to streamline government, an effort being spearheaded by the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE representatives have entered NASA headquarters in Washington and are examining its contracts, two sources said.
If SLS ends up on the chopping block, Musk will struggle to overcome political hurdles, since cancelling large projects has ripple effects across other areas of the federal bureaucracy including widespread job cuts.
SLS, whose workforce is most concentrated in the Republican strongholds of Alabama and Texas, is a prime example.
Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville from Alabama, whose state is home to 14,000 SLS jobs, defended the program and played down cancellation threats.
“The SLS will be fine,” Tuberville said. “I know that there’s a lot – because of Elon Musk involved in the DOGE situation – there’s a lot of rumors out there on that, but I got full confidence on the SLS and the future for them.”
Republican Representative Dale Strong, whose Alabama district includes NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the epicenter of the SLS workforce, told Reuters that it was not the time to reassess SLS, saying: “You look what it’s doing for national security, I don’t think now is the time to check up” on it.
Boeing and Northrop Grumman are NASA’s top two contractors building SLS. Delays and roughly $24 billion in development costs since 2012 have fueled arguments for its retirement. Each launch could cost between $2 billion to $4 billion, while less powerful but newer alternatives, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, have a price tag of around $250 million for each launch.
Strong said he wants the program to be cost effective and believes competition from a private company like SpaceX would be healthy.
Boeing declined to comment and Northrop did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
NASA has struggled to cut costs with SLS and create a plan to make it more competitive with commercial rockets. SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are introducing newer rockets that are reusable and far cheaper, but less powerful.
Musk noted, for example, in a January 2020 post on his social media platform X: “Fundamental issue with SLS is that it’s not reusable, which means that a billion dollar rocket is blown up every launch!” SpaceX’s rockets can be used more than once.
Isaacman has called SLS “outrageously expensive.”
But SLS backers argue that, despite its dismal development history, SLS is the only rocket designed for a modern moon mission that has proved capable of successfully flying, and its cancellation would upend NASA’s race with China, whose own moon landing target of 2030 has pressured the U.S. to keep its moon program on track.
Texas Representative Brian Babin, the Republican chairman of a space committee that oversees NASA, said this week: “If we’re going to get to the moon before the Chinese, Space Launch System is going to have to be what gets us there.”
Bill Nelson, a former senator from Florida and NASA’s former administrator, said SLS will not be canceled in the next four years.
“I suspect that President Trump would like to be the president when we land on the moon after a half century, with five or six billion people watching,” Nelson said.
Recent advances in SpaceX’s development of Starship, which is reusable and expected to be far cheaper than current rockets, have galvanized the anti-SLS critics, arguing Musk’s rocket can effectively do the same tasks at a fraction of the price.
But SLS supporters say that, unlike Musk’s Starship, it has already flown successfully in its operational form and that its power to lift heavy objects into space in a single launch is greater than the multiple launches required by a reusable Starship to carry similar weight.
“You’d be giving up the world’s only capability to get astronauts to the moon, which would be a definite disruption to U.S. leadership in space,” said Tom Culligan, the former top lobbyist at Boeing’s space unit.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette and Bo Erickson in Washington; editing by Chris Sanders and Deepa Babington)
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