KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – A big indication has dropped that NASA’s moon rocket might really get canceled far sooner than planned.
Critics have called the Space Launch System outdated and wasteful for years, but now, with President Trump retaking the White House, Boeing is warning its employees who work on the SLS that they could lose their jobs very soon.
Boeing gave News 6 a statement over the weekend that reads:
“To align with revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations, we informed our Space Launch System team of the potential for approximately 400 fewer positions by April 2025. This will require 60-day notices of involuntary layoff be issued to impacted employees in coming weeks, in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. We are working with our customer and seeking opportunities to redeploy employees across our company to minimize job losses and retain our talented teammates.”
Some 140 Boeing employees were just laid off after a bad 2024 for the company which was emphasized by its Starliner capsule’s failure to bring home two astronauts from the International Space Station.
Artemis II is supposed to launch, with his latest delay, in April 2026.
Space journalist Dr. Ken Kremer, who covered the end of the space shuttle program, thinks the writing is on the wall for SLS now, too.
“It sure seems like it,” Kremer told News 6 reporter James Sparvero, but he doesn’t think ending the program would be a good decision.
“SLS is years behind schedule and billions over budget, but to cancel it now is completely idiotic because what this is gonna do is enable the communist Chinese,” Kremer argued. “At some point in the future, yeah, maybe we can replace SLS, but not in the next few years. Nothing is gonna be ready.”
China is claiming it can put its own astronauts on the moon by 2030, and when Bill Nelson was still NASA administrator he also touched on SLS being the only current human-rated vehicle that can carry astronauts to the moon.
In a press conference in December, Nelson said he expected SLS and Artemis would continue into the new administration.
“I don’t see that you’re suddenly going to have Starship take over everything,” he said about SpaceX’s mega rocket which is contracted to be the human lander system for Artemis III.
Also in December, reporters talked to Artemis II mission managers and the astronauts about the rumors of canceling SLS. They were more focused on the tasks at hand.
“I don’t think anybody here has any time to think about anything else other than getting this vehicle processed, getting it rolled out to the pad, and then flying the crew safely,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program.
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