The administration is proposing ending Gateway, and SLS/Orion after Artemis III. That’s still two flights too many, but it all has yet to play out.
[Afternoon update]
Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman.
[Sunday-morning update]
Speaking of Bob Zimmerman, he’s less than impressed with Lockheed Martin’s delivery of the first crew-capable Orion.
[Bumped]
What I predicted, split the baby.
Doesn’t mean much. Congress will fold and restore a lot of those cuts.
I suspect Gateway is the giveback.
I was thinking that the Chandra and Hubble cuts would be given back. Cheaper and more publicly visible.
I am at a loss to explain what the rationale (other than a blatant payoff to Cruz) would be for restoring the Gateway. Without Artemis, there is simply no point for it, and Artemis is going to be capped at two missions. I noticed a comment on Zimmerman’s blog suggesting that more ISS money would be the giveback (likely as an offset to the lost Gateway) along with some support projects for our ‘partners’ (JAXA’s work on a pressurized rover being the most obvious example), and quite frankly this strikes me as most reasonable.
I don’t disagree that there are going to be some givebacks, but Gateway seems the least likely to me. We should see shortly, and if I am proven wrong, I will happily concede my error!
The degree of international support.
What the international partners really want is their own flags and footprints on the Moon. Gateway was what they were willing to settle for in the short term. Give them what they really want and they’ll drop Gateway like a hot potato.
Artemis isn’t going to be capped at two more missions, SLS and Orion are. Artemis will continue with different means of getting crews to and from rendezvous with landers. The first of these different means will be an additional Starship variant. The second will be something reusable that launches atop New Glenn.
That something will not be Orion. Orion is not reusable and its production cadence is in line with SLS, not the launch cadence of which New Glenn will prove capable not too much further down the road.
Both replacements will support larger crew sizes than Orion. Both will also allow for far less expensive and far more frequent lunar missions. Neither will require the “services” of Gateway.
The larger crew sizes and more frequent missions will allow the ISS/Gateway international partners – minus Russia, but plus a lot of Artemis Accords signatories – to do what they really want to do which is see their own national flags and footprints on the lunar surface. They will not miss Gateway in the slightest.
Cruz should be mollified as the extra missions and faster cadence made possible by cancelling SLS, Orion and Gateway will give on-going and open-ended work to JSC mission control.
There will – probably sometime in the 2030s – emerge a need for one or more rotating 1-G space stations in lunar orbit as R&R locations for long-term lunar workers. Until then, lunar workers doing infrastructure development on the lunar surface will have to be rotated back Earthside for health reasons. At a minimum, these missions can be heel-and-toed like ISS missions. Thus, the Moon will be the next continuously-crewed “space station” in fairly short order following the initial Artemis landings.
“””There will – probably sometime in the 2030s – emerge a need for one or more rotating 1-G space stations in lunar orbit as R&R locations for long-term lunar workers. Until then, lunar workers doing infrastructure development on the lunar surface will have to be rotated back Earthside for health reasons.””””
Maybe and maybe not. It depends heavily on the health effects of 1/6 gee on the body. It may work out that the low gravity is good enough for continuous occupation, or it may have very little mitigation effects. We don’t know.
Also, it may be that a rotating structure on the surface may be more convenient and less expensive if 1 gee becomes necessary.
And the R&R may have features different from what has gone before. 1/6 gee sports and high gee carousels and low gee waterparks. Plus the possibilities for activities more associated with high earning tradesmen far from home. Gambling, drinking, and commercial s3x
You’re right, we don’t know. But the conservative route is to assume 1/6-G will be only modestly less injurious than zero-G. That would mean lunar surface duty tours of six to eight months should be doable before some R&R in 1-G is needful. The R&R interlude might need to be several months by itself.
Long-term, large-diameter rotating habs – most probably built inside small craters to take advantage of the extant wall slope – probably are the most economical way to extend lunar surface stays indefinitely. But this will require that lunar ISRU industry be scaled to a fairly sizable extent before enough output can be allocated for this purpose. The initial priority will be power generation and metal smelting/forming.
In the interim, outfits like Vast, Gravitics or sierra Space could build station modules deliverable to suitable lunar orbit by Starship and assembled into 1-G stations, then spun up.
Relatively small units can be done on the surface for frequent “tuning up” that don’t have to have the full range of facilities. Daily visits of a couple of hours would be possible in units as low as 100′ in diameter. Meals, showers, standing desks, and other activities other than the mandatory work outs in 1 gee could extend missions to any extent wanted. Also, there will be a few that skimp the “tuning up” that will serve as a control group.
It depends heavily on why they are there and what they accomplish during that time. Not to mention the thoughts of Doug Plata on Lunar retirement homes.
If, as I strongly suspect, 1/6-G does not prove salubrious for long-term continuous human exposure, then crew rotations will still be needed from the get-go until your notional rotating habs are economically buildable and operable. That is not going to be right away. I think it will be a minimum of 25 years from first landing to first such rotating surface hab. And I suspect that will prove optimistic.
Crew rotation back to Earth will have to do in the very early going. Landing the tonnage of material required to build even a “small” 100-ft. rotating hab will be prohibitive early on. That will have to await the standing up of very significant power and metal smelting/forming infrastructure based mostly on bootstrapped ISRU.
Tonnage landed from Earth will need to be mainly what is needed to establish these industries at pilot scale so that local supply of the heaviest stuff needed for expansion can be produced locally.
R&R space stations in lunar orbit could be built much earlier and far less expensively than rotating habs on the surface. The first such might well be built within five years of initial Artemis landing. Just getting Earth-built station modules to lunar orbit will be much cheaper than getting comparable hab volume down to the surface as all the propellant and infrastructure needed to do that would be obviated.
What would those long-term lunar surface workers be doing? Building their own fixed surface hab volume plus power and metal industry infrastructure. Much of that work will be done by Optimus-type robots, but not all. The normative lunar resident for the first few decades of lunar settlement will be a male, blue-collar hard-hat.
As you correctly note, there will inevitably need to be provision for both camp followers and working girls in this milieu as well. The Moon can be expected to have the social dynamics of a Wild West boomtown for many decades after the initial Artemis landings.
Not far behind power and metal on the ISRU priority list will be some form of agriculture so that food can quickly transition from an all-imported to a mostly-local thing. Once agriculture is at even a pilot stage, local production of beer, wine and distilled spirits will quickly follow. The distilled spirits of choice will likely be some form of rum, vodka and/or “shine.”
Professor, I’m confused!
What was that Boeing spacecraft that became unsafe to return Butch and Sumi from the International Space Station, and how does it differ from this Lockheed spacecraft that is supposed to go to the Moon and not land there?
I got blocked by Jeff Foust for posting, “Looks great to me, assuming they do what is outlined in the link.”
There are some things getting cut that I think are beneficial but considering the debt and the near term importance of other issues, I think it is important to look at the greater good rather than what I want.
Letting SLS get some launches in and then go away isn’t ideal but it is a good compromise. Mars sample return isn’t needed as there might be people on the planet before its ready. NASA can come back to the propulsion work. I am guessing the gullible warming and DEI cuts are what stings the people who are always outraged over everything existing.
DEI is too religious and political for government agencies to be pushing and diversity will arise on its own just hiring based on merit. That is if you aren’t racist and think minorities are smart enough to do the job.
For years, wasn’t it the Leftist line about cutting NASA because it is better to spend that money here on the poor rather than waste it out there? So it’s gonna be amusing to watch Leftists get all outraged about these cuts when they are finally getting much of what they wanted.
The leftists who wanted to cut NASA budget are not the same as the leftists now complaining about cutting NASA budget.
There’s a reason the budgets have ballooned; they’ve been trying to make everyone not too unhappy. Except the ones who wanted to cut the overall budget.
I’ve noticed that a lot of these people view themselves as entitled to other people’s money as if they are some form of nobility or priesthood. They have zero respect for where the money comes from, they don’t comprehend the risks/challenges the country faces, and are incapable of thinking beyond their narrow self interest.
Tapeworms are also unconcerned with the welfare of the host.
Overall I am happy with the proposed cuts. We have to do everything we can to get our fiscal house in order. That is a huge ticking bomb.
But, I am disappointed to see the greatest risk to NASA’s involvement was left untouched (and even supported). The Commercial LEO Destinations (CLDs) have a high likelihood of locking perhaps $2 B/yr of NASA’s budget into a not particularly useful rut where we feel lock into utilizing those so-called commercial stations for what? Decades? And getting research that is about a non-memorable as much if the research that we are getting now. I would rather that money go to developing surface systems and purchasing large numbers of flights to the Moon and Mars using the Starship fleet.
I do wish that the last two Starship test flights had gone better because the case would be more clear that full reusability is likely and SpaceX would be on the verge of demonstrating propellant depot, transfer, and storage.
Overall the budget simply brings NASA’s budget back to what it was in 2016, about $18 billion. NASA was able to accomplish quite a lot with that amount of money, so this is not as draconian as many will certainly claim.
The real question is what did NASA accomplish with 24% more money over the last 8 years? That’s the real problem with NASA these days. There isn’t a program designed to be accomplished in a cycle that would allow it to survive.
Artemis was started over a decade ago using concepts developed even earlier. Orion two decades ago. While this may be rocket science; rocket science has progressed much faster than the project management of these programs at NASA.
Adjusting for inflation, $18 billion in 2016 is equal to about $24 billion today.
Ironically, increasing NASA’s budget was also the cause of inflation. (Along with all the other spending of course)
This morning, I read in a forum at NASASpaceflight.com that the initial notices for the next Starship launch have been posted. The earliest date was May 9th but they also posted dates for about two weeks after that. They also had a video of a 30 second Ship static fire where something “energetic” happened at about the 25 second mark. It appeared to be a failure of one of the Raptor engines.
Let’s hope they’ve fixed the problem(s) with Ship and this flight is fully successful.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2025/05/ship-35-sf-spacex-has-fleet-vehicles-flight/
I realize that static fire didn’t go the way SpaceX wanted it to go, but it could be a blessing. Now they have a failure with the pieces at Starbase, TX to analyze what the hell is happening.
I got the dates wrong. The first date is May 13th.
https://x.com/Alexphysics13/status/1919545598673346699?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1919545598673346699%7Ctwgr%5E48c61f0446d939b7972c41f68526903937db96d6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.nasaspaceflight.com%2Findex.php%3Ftopic%3D62494.160