Legacy Aerospace Giants won a victory on Tuesday as the US Senate passed the budget reconciliation bill of President Trump, which allocates billions more for the NASA flagship program.
The addition of $ 10 billion to the Artemis arrangement, which includes funding for additional space launch system rockets and an orbital station around the moon called Gate, is a reproach to critics who wished to see alternative technologies used instead. Among those critics are Elon Musk, Director General of Spacex and billionaire Jared Isaacman, whom Musk proposed as the following NASA manager.
There is no sign that nasty relations between Musk and Trump are recovering. If Trump signs the bill, the fall that began after the sudden review of the President of Isaacman’s appointment, will probably continue – if not accelerated.
Musk was especially aimed at the rocket of the space launch system, as it is fully elusive. Unlike the SpaceX rocket family, which are all designed to be reusable, SLS is only one -off use. As Musk put it back in 2020This means “a billion dollar rocket is blown up” every time it is launched. Even that may have been an underestimate; more recent digits of NASA’s guardian Put repeat production costs closer to $ 2.5 billion each.
A total of about $ 24 billion have been spilled to SLS production to date, funds, which mainly went to a consortium of aerospace primes, including Boeing, aerojet Rocketdyne of L3harris, and Northrop Grumman, which leads construction of the main rocket components.
During his recent confirmation hearing with the Senate, Isaacman questioned the massive sums. He claimed to use SLS for the next two Artemis missions, but ultimately said he does not think the rocket is “the long -term way to reach both from the moon and to Mars with great frequency.”
Congress – and Trump, if he decides to sign the bill into law – decided to push forward. About $ 4.1 billion $ 10 billion of dollars added to the document will go to additional SLS rockets for Artemis missions 4 and 5. Meanwhile about $ 2.6 billion will go to completion of the gateway station.
Notably, the president’s fiscal annual budget request for NASA presented in May proposed to “perform the spacecraft of the Space Launch and Space Shuttle Orion after the Artemis III mission is over.” This new funding flies before this proposal, which was presented before the public fall of Musk and Trump in June.
The new funding includes $ 700 million for a new MARS telecommunications orbit, $ 1.25 billion for further operation of the International Space Station, and $ 325 million to SpaceX for the development of a spacecraft to deorbit the ISS at the end of the decade. (The overall prize for this Deorbit spacecraft is $ 843 million.))
