White House Plan To Kill SLS Super-Rocket Could Halt Moon Landings

The White House plan to kill the cutting-edge Orion spacecraft, shown here, and the Space Launch System super-rocket could halt NASA’s ability to land astronauts on the Moon in the late 2020s, even as Space Race II unfolds. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Getty Images

The White House scheme to terminate the powerful Space Launch System rocket after just one lunar touchdown mission could jeopardize sequel landings already scheduled through the next decade, says a leading space scholar.

The president’s proposal to slash NASA’s budget and kill the SLS—now the most powerful American spacecraft approved to propel astronaut flights—could create a “worst-case scenario” where the U.S. is no longer able to loft its spacefarers to the craters of the Moon, says Dr. Sara Webb, who chronicles the global space race from her post at the Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, part of the prestigious Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

The United States seized its space superpower status by winning Space Race I with its fantastical first astronaut flight to the Moon a generation ago, and NASA’s foremost backers across both houses of Congress are now warning that the myriad cuts proposed in its funding could endanger that supreme ranking as Space Race II unfolds.

Dr. Webb, an acclaimed astrophysicist and author who has also conducted groundbreaking micro-gravity experiments on the International Space Station, tells me in an interview: “It’s deeply concerning seeing many of the proposed budget line item cuts from the White House.”

“I think it’s important to note,” she adds, “that this proposal isn’t set in stone.”

“Congress needs to work to approve a budget and many scientists are currently working to lobby for what is needed to support a healthy and continuing space sector.”

Janet Petro, then-acting administrator of NASA, said in a preface to the skeleton budget issued by the White House that after the Artemis III mission—which will send American astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the last millennium—the SLS and the Orion space capsule will both be axed.

The colossal rocket and the cutting-edge capsule are currently the most technologically advanced deep-space vehicles produced in the U.S., and even worldwide, and NASA has already invested tens of billions of dollars into their development for an intricately planned series of lunar expeditions.

While jettisoning the globe’s top Moon-bound spacecraft to save costs, Petro said, “NASA will continue the Artemis campaign by procuring crew transportation services from U.S. companies.”

NASA has already commissioned SpaceX to rendezvous with the Orion in orbit around the Moon to shuttle two American astronauts to the orb’s South Pole sector, in the Artemis III mission, now scheduled for 2027.

Under the president’s new blueprints for NASA, the agency looks set to depend on Elon Musk’s outfit to loft future Moon explorers aboard the SpaceX Starship from the Kennedy Space Center as SLS flights are aborted.

But that strategy faces a minefield of potential perils, says Dr. Webb, who has chronicled the experimental Starship’s ongoing flight tests, including those that ended in pyrotechnic explosions, and its potential to ultimately lead a revolution in lower-cost treks to the Moon and later Mars.

While the first three demo flights of the Starship earlier this year ended in the upper stage, plagued by glitches in the propulsion and propellent systems, making a fiery re-entry through the atmosphere, the last test in August was a technological marvel, with both stages completing almost perfect splashdowns, Webb says.

That points toward the spectacular promise of the Starship in times ahead.

The Starship, with its advanced technologies and reusable design, likely represents the future of spaceflight once it has been proven to be safe to hold astronauts, she predicts.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, which routinely return via precision landings after each launch, Webb points out, have already upended the global space sector; with their outstanding reliability and competitive pricing these boosters now dominate the worldwide launch market, and have been the model for the Starship super-capsule.

Yet SpaceX still has to crisscross an celestial obstacle course of tech challenges before it can launch spacefarers to the Moon or to Mars on the Starship, including marking a repeating pattern of safe passage through the atmosphere, soft landings, refueling the ship in orbit, demonstrating a pinpoint descent onto a lunar landing site and having the capsule “human-rated” by NASA.

In contrast, the Space Launch System lofted the Orion onto a perfect, remotely piloted debut flight around the Moon back in 2022, Dr. Webb says, with “a beautiful execution of engineering and planning for the Artemis 1 mission.”

The SLS is set to propel an international contingent of astronauts on the Artemis II lunar flyby just eight months from now, and launch another team of explorers to orbit around the black and silver orb a year later—if the SpaceX Starship is ready by then to dock with the Orion and fly two navigators down to the surface.

Abruptly decommissioning this super-heavy-lift rocket and next-generation Orion, before SpaceX or another independent spacecraft designer has demonstrated an alternative proven safe to speed spacefarers from the surface of the globe to the calderas of the Moon, would be a high-risk gamble, Dr. Webb says.

This crew module and booster have been “carefully created and designed to meet the future needs of deep space exploration, including but not limited to lunar and eventually Martian missions.”

“To scrap the program would mean that very specific and valuable skills and people will be lost.”

SLS technology, Webb says, “has been advanced and tried over many decades.”

“The current reliability and robustness of SLS is higher to that of say a Starship. It is a fail-safe option where we have large confidence in its ability to be put into the ‘workforce’.”

“Because SLS is built on traditional rocketry techniques,” Webb adds, “it’s unlikely to have as many catastrophic failures (compared to Starships and others).”

This supreme confidence in the design and engineering of the Orion and SLS, and their ability to help the U.S. hold onto its pole-star position in leading-edge expeditions, is the general consensus across NASA and Congress.

The one outstanding drawback of the SLS is its astronomical price.

“One foundational challenge facing the Artemis campaign is its enormous expense,” George Scott, then deputy inspector general at NASA, reported in 2024.

“In 2021, we projected total Artemis costs between 2012 and 2025 to be $93 billion,” Scott added.

That means if the rocket is terminated after just two jaunts to the Moon, sending a total of eight aeronauts on the Artemis II and III missions, NASA will have spent more than $10 billion on each astronaut’s lunar trek.

Under the White House gamble that SpaceX can perfect its Starship over the next two years, and then instantly replace the SLS launcher, Dr. Webb says, “The worst-case scenario though is one where SLS is scrapped fully, jobs, skill expertise are lost to time … and Starship is not able to reach milestones or launch readiness.”

That would mean, she says, that: “We have a large gap in time where certain objectives and missions aren’t achievable with other alternatives,” including future Moon touchdowns and the first human flights to Mars.

To avert this potential abandonment of American deep-space power, Webb says, the U.S. should hold steady with its longstanding masterplan to loft the SLS-Orion across a series of Artemis flights to cislunar space, into the 2030s, while giving SpaceX squadrons of space-tech wizards time to fine-tune the Starship mega-rocket.

While operating the SLS for the foreseeable future, she says, “Having the possibility of Starship being able to take on some of the future Artemis roles is also very important.”

Rockets that can be launched repeatedly and economically, and especially the Starship, are likely to be key to the next phase of expanding spaceflight, as humans begin exploring other worlds.

Yet even as SpaceX spearheads this revolution in rocketry, she says, NASA should keep the Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule as a back-up, always waiting in the wings in case some flight anomaly temporarily grounds SpaceX’s avant-garde, almost alien spacecraft.

Meanwhile, there are already signs that Congress is racing to shield the Orion and its super-rocket from the White House scythes aimed at NASA.

Ted Cruz, one of the Senate’s most powerful backers of the American space agency, of the quest to land NASA astronauts near the Moon’s mysterious polar region, and of U.S. space-tech power, as symbolized by the SLS, recently introduced a reconciliation bill, passed over the summer, that provides $4,100,000,000 to operate the Space Launch System for the Artemis IV mission, along with funding for the Orion for that same flight.

Dr. Sara Webb, meanwhile, predicts that as the 2030s unfold, Starship could become the globe’s overwhelmingly dominant spacecraft, shuttling space sojourners to the cosmopolitan American and European outposts on the Moon, and perhaps even to the domed city being constructed by SpaceX robots on the orange-red dunes of Mars.