Duffy wants to recompete HLS.

[Wednesday-morning update]

One of the reasons that we have made so little progress in space for the past half century is that Congress decided that NASA had to have its own space transportation, regardless of how terrible it is at it.

— Rand Simberg (@Simberg_Space) October 21, 2025

Delete unnecessary parts and processes ==> If Starship can land 100 T of stuff on the Moon, or fly >10 T to and from the Moon from LEO without refueling, all other parts of the NASA so-called "architecture" are unnecessary, regardless of how many tens of billions of dollars have… https://t.co/Gna5xuX9GO

— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) October 21, 2025

There have been many dud NASA administrators, some of which looked good on paper (e.g., Dick Truly). Webb was a lawyer, but even he had experience in the aviation industry. What are Duffy's qualifications? You need to at least know which end the fire comes out of.

— Rand Simberg (@Simberg_Space) October 22, 2025

[Early-afternoon update]

Bob Zimmerman is not impressed.

Lockmart is starting to look to reusability and other launch vehicles than SLS for Orion.

NASA may want to have it for its precious astronauts, but at some point it will be embarrassing when Starship is putting up dozens of people at a fraction of the cost.

Eric Berger has the latest. Killing EUS would also eliminate the need for ML-2. It could be that we’ll have to continue wasting money on the SLS core and Orion for a while, but it would free up some funds to actually get back to the Moon soon.