by Washington – Boeing has informed employees of the Space Launch System program that could lose their jobs up to 400 of them, because the new administration is considering canceling the program.
Boeing SLS employees were informed on 7 February that the company was preparing to cut up to 400 jobs from the program because of “Reviews of the Artemis program and the cost expectations”. The specific positions that are eligible for elimination were not announced, but would declare a significant part of the total SLS staff file at the company.
“To adjust to revisions of the Artemis program and the cost expectations, we today informed our Space Launch Systems team of the potential for around 400 fewer positions by April 2025,” a Boeing spokesperson told SpaceWs. “This requires that 60-day notifications of involuntary dismissal are issued to affected employees in the coming weeks, in accordance with the Work Appoctment and Retraining Notification Act.”
The Work Aan Passing and Overdating Report (WARN) ACT requires that companies give 60 days of notification of facility closures or other mass dismissals. “We work together with our client and are looking for opportunities to re -use employees in our company to minimize job losses and to retain our talented teammates,” said the spokesperson. The planned redundancies were first reported by Bloomberg.
NASA has not announced any revisions in the Artemis program, and a panel of NASA and industrial officials said at the Spacecom conference January 29 that they imagined with preparations for the Artemis 2 mission, the first crewsls/orion flight, planned for April 2026. They argued that current architecture remains the fastest way to bring people back to the moon.
However, the Trump government is considering revisions of architecture, including the cancellation of important elements such as SLS and Orion. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, who is a good adviser to President Trump, has criticized the current approach to Artemis.
With regard to space, the Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient, because it is a job-maximizing program, not a result-maximizing program, “he posted on social media December 25. “Something completely new is necessary.”
SLS has been criticized since almost the beginning, mocked by some critics such as the “Senate Lancing System” because of its origins in a NASA authorization Act of 2010 that NASA has instructed to develop a heavy rocket using shuttle-deducted technologies as a way to The way to reduce the impact of the retirement of space travel and cancellation of the constellation program.
SLS was first launched in 2022 on the Artemis 1 mission. “The escape vehicle was proven at Artemis 1. It was a great mission,” said John Shannon, vice -president of the mission for Boeing Space Exploration, on the Spacecom Panel. There were few changes to the vehicle itself for Artemis 2, he said, but changes to how the vehicle was processed, with some work from the Michoud assembly facility moved to the Kennedy Space Center.
“This is our second and many lessons have been learned,” said Dave Dutcher, Boeing SLS program manager, in an interview in July. “It is a much cleaner vehicle during the build and then tests the first.”
However, SLS remains a subject of criticism of its high costs and a low escape percentage. A report from the NASA’s Office of Inspector General in August also found quality problems with the work of Boeing on the Exploration -above stage, a more powerful top phase planned for the Block 1B version of SLS that will start with Service on Artemis 4.
Any attempt to cancel SLS or make other radical changes to the Artemis architecture will probably be confronted with the opposition of some in the congress, as was the case in 2010 when the Obama government tried to cancel the constellation program, a process That led to the SLS. In particular the vice-chairman of the commerce, justice and science sub-committee of the House Apprisions Committee is rep. Dale Strong (R-Ala.), Whose district Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the main center for SLS.
