NASA’s SLS rocket program has been a mess for a long, long time. Many industry-watchers have wondered why NASA would spend billions of taxpayer dollars on its own rocket while the private space industry is working on their own heavy-lift vehicles that could accomplish similar things.
It seems that NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman may be asking the same question, according to Loren Grush, Ed Ludlow, and Julie Johnsson at Bloomberg:
Under the original plan set years ago, Boeing’s Space Launch System rocket would have launched a crew of four riding inside the Lockheed Martin Corp.-built Orion crew capsule to the moon, with the spacecraft then putting itself in the moon’s orbit. A [SpaceX] Starship lander would then meet up and dock with the capsule around the moon, before taking astronauts down to the lunar surface.
With the new proposal, SLS would no longer be used to boost Orion close to the moon — previously a key task for the rocket. Instead, Starship and Orion would dock in Earth orbit, giving Starship the pivotal role of propelling the capsule to the moon’s orbit, before taking astronauts down to the surface.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman plans to meet on Tuesday with the companies working on Artemis and human landing system program (HLS), including Blue Origin LLC, Boeing and SpaceX, to discuss their progress and the latest plans at the agency. Any changes to the mission could face Congressional scrutiny, and the agency could reverse and alter its plans, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the matter is confidential.
Under this new plan, the SLS would fly four more missions (at an estimated cost of $4 billion each) while HLS partners got up to speed. After that, astronauts would get to the lunar surface via a SpaceX or Blue Origin rocket. This would leave the SLS as it is today, with none of its future, more powerful versions being built. Its use would be diminished to potentially be used to launch the Orion crew capsule into Earth orbit and no further.
That would be a slow, sad ending to what could have been an amazing story, but I think NASA is finally seeing the writing on the wall. The SLS is simply too complicated and too expensive to become a reliable, long-term launch vehicle.