Congress just greenlit a NASA moon plan opposed by Musk and Isaacman
Legacy aerospace giants scored a win Tuesday when the U.S. Senate passed President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill that earmarks billions more for NASA’s flagship Artemis program.
The $10 billion addition to the Artemis architecture, which includes funding for additional Space Launch System rockets and an orbiting station around the moon called Gateway, is a rebuke to critics who wished to see alternative technologies used instead. Among those critics are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who Musk proposed as the next NASA administrator.
There’s no sign the souring relations between Musk and Trump are recovering. If Trump signs the bill, the fallout, which began after the president’s abrupt revocation of Isaacman’s nomination, will likely continue — if not escalate.
Musk in particular has taken aim at the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on the grounds that it is fully expendable. Unlike SpaceX’s family of rockets, which are all designed to be reusable, SLS is one-time use only. As Musk put it back in 2020, that means “a billion dollar rocket is blown up” every time it is launched. Even that may have been an understatement; more recent figures from NASA’s watchdog put recurring production costs closer to $2.5 billion each.
A total of around $24 billion has been poured into SLS production to date, funds that have primarily gone to a consortium of aerospace primes, including Boeing, L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Northrop Grumman, which leads construction of the major rocket components.
During his recent confirmation hearings with the Senate, Isaacman questioned the massive sums. He affirmed using SLS for the next two Artemis missions, but ultimately said he didn’t think the rocket was “the long‑term way to get to and from the moon and to Mars with great frequency.”
Congress — and Trump, if he decides to sign the bill into law — have decided to press ahead. Around $4.1 billion of the $10 billion total added to the document will go toward additional SLS rockets for Artemis missions 4 and 5. Meanwhile, around $2.6 billion will go toward completion of the Gateway station.
Notably, the president’s fiscal year budget request for NASA submitted in May proposed to “phase out the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft after the Artemis III mission is complete.” This new funding flies in the face of that proposal, which was submitted before Musk and Trump’s public fallout in June.
The new funding includes $700 million for a new Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, $1.25 billion for additional operation of the International Space Station, and $325 million to SpaceX for the development of a spacecraft to de-orbit the ISS at the end of the decade. (The total award for that de-orbit spacecraft is $843 million.)
Aria Alamalhodaei covers the space and defense industries at TechCrunch. Previously, she covered the public utilities and the power grid for California Energy Markets. You can also find her work at MIT’s Undark Magazine, The Verge, and Discover Magazine. She received an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aria is based in Austin, Texas.
