Congress Should End the SLS Misadventure
The Trump administration is signaling it will end support for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
The so-called fiscal year (FY) 2026 “skinny” budget, released on May 2, 2025, called for an end to the SLS after three launches, noting that the program is 140 percent over budget. The proposal will allow for two more launches and stated that funding will be included for “a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions.”
The SLS’s struggles have long been a cause for concern for the Artemis program, which endeavors to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon. A March 10, 2020, NASA Office of Inspector General report blamed both Boeing, the prime contractor, and NASA for lax oversight that led to poor performance and spiraling costs in the program. Every main component of the rocket designed for the first Artemis test “experienced technical challenges, performance issues, and requirement changes that collectively have resulted in $2 billion of cost overruns and increases and at least 2 years of schedule delays.” Between 2011 and 2022, the SLS racked up $23.8 billion in total costs. Each of the remaining launches will cost $4 billion, which alone argues for the program’s immediate discontinuation.
The SLS’s struggles might have been predicted based on its inauspicious beginning. The George W. Bush administration’s Constellation program directed NASA to build a new heavy-lift rocket, the Ares V, to facilitate a return to the Moon and eventual Martian exploration. After five years of extraordinary cost growth and deficient performance, Constellation was cancelled by then-President Obama effective in FY 2011.
However, four influential former senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) succeeded in saving the rocket, rebranded the SLS. The strong backing over the years by legislators in the upper chamber of Congress earned the SLS a new moniker, the “Senate Launch System.”
To replace the SLS, NASA should return to the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS), which successfully tapped commercial companies to develop and operate two options for cargo transport to the International Space Station still in use today. NASA should again use the COTS model to develop the capacity for lunar missions via the private sector. This would be far cheaper than hiring a company to build a new launch system that would ultimately be owned and operated by NASA, like the SLS. Congress should therefore agree with the proposal in the skinny budget by cancelling the SLS and giving NASA the authority to look instead to the private sector.
