The Economics of Ending SLS
- Space Frontier Foundation
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
An economic analysis of the Space Launch System and the commercial transition after Artemis V.
The Space Launch System is the most expensive rocket per kilogram NASA has ever flown. Not “one of the most expensive.” The most. By a factor that should end any serious debate about its future.
In a new economic analysis released by the Space Frontier Foundation, Dr. Michael Faulkender lays out the numbers. The numbers are not close. They are not even in the same league.
(Dr. Faulkender served as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and former acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and is one of America’s most credible voices on public finance.)
The Three Cs: Cost, Capacity, Cadence
Every launch vehicle in the Artemis architecture can be measured against three benchmarks: how much it costs to send a kilogram to Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI), how much mass it can deliver in a single flight, and how often it can fly. Here is what we found:
Read that table again. SLS, fielded in 2022, delivers less mass to TLI than the Saturn V did in 1969, at more than twice the cost per kilogram, at half the cadence and it does not even reach the lunar surface. After fifty years of advancement in aerospace engineering and $65 billion in development spending, the United States built a heavy-lift vehicle that is worse than the one we retired during the Nixon administration.
On a full-mission basis, including the Orion capsule, the European Service Module, and operations; SLS costs 63 times more per kilogram than Starship and 14 times more than New Glenn.
The Capacity Trap
Here is the part that should be disqualifying on its own: the Orion/ESM crew stack masses 26.5 metric tons. SLS can deliver 27.2 metric tons to TLI. The vehicle is saturated by its own primary payload. There is no room for cargo, no room for redundancy, no room for the infrastructure that a sustained lunar presence actually requires.
This is why NASA already contracts SpaceX and Blue Origin to handle the Human Landing System. The commercial vehicles are doing the hard part; Earth ascent, Trans-Lunar Injection, lunar descent, and ascent, while SLS is paid $4.1 billion per mission to act as a one-way crew ferry to cislunar space.
We are paying super-heavy-lift prices for a job a smaller, reusable rocket can do better.
Annual Throughput Tells the Real Story
Per-flight numbers understate the gap. What matters for a permanent lunar base is how much mass you can move per year:
SLS: 27.2 metric tons annually
New Glenn: 240 metric tons annually
Starship: ~6,150 metric tons annually
That is more than two orders of magnitude. It is not a competition. It is a category error.
Why This Matters Now
The People’s Republic of China is not building an SLS. They watched what SpaceX did with reusability and they are copying that, not us. In February 2026, China conducted the inaugural powered flight of the Long March-10 first stage, demonstrating controlled vertical descent. U.S. Space Force leadership has warned that China could surpass U.S. launch cadence by 2030.
The lunar South Pole has water ice. The regolith holds rare earth elements and Helium-3. Independent feasibility analysis shows that lunar resource extraction becomes economically viable at roughly $3,000–$5,000 per kilogram to the lunar surface. Starship hits that threshold. SLS misses it by an order of magnitude at SLS economics, Helium-3 mining requires a 160-year payback period, which is to say, never.
Every year the U.S. anchors its lunar architecture to SLS is a year the commercial lunar economy doesn’t reach the volume needed to drive costs into viability. Federal demand is the anchor customer. Without it, the market doesn’t scale.
The Executive Branch Already Agrees
This is no longer a partisan question. Consider:
The Biden Administration’s NASA Inspector General called SLS “unsustainable” in 2022 congressional testimony.
The Trump White House OMB FY2027 budget request calls SLS “grossly expensive and delayed” and notes it “cost taxpayers nearly $65 billion and flew once.”
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman publicly endorsed the administration’s commercial transition in his April 3, 2026 message to the workforce.
What remains is a congressional decision about appropriations.
The Off-ramp
Our recommendation is not radical. It is phased and verifiable:
Honor the existing commitments. Fly Artemis III, IV, and V on SLS as currently funded.
Authorize no new SLS contracts. No block-buys, no long-lead procurement, nothing beyond the three already-funded missions.
Award competitive Firm-Fixed-Price contracts for crewed cislunar transport — the same model that produced $3.9 billion in audited savings under the COTS program.
Close the SLS production line at Artemis V and transition to monthly Moon missions on commercial architecture by 2030, fulfilling Executive Order 14369.
On the Workforce Question
The hardest part of this argument isn’t the math. It’s the people. Tens of thousands of skilled aerospace workers have built careers around SLS, and the communities hosting its production facilities have real stakes in what happens next.
But the global commercial space economy reached $613 billion in 2024 and is growing at nearly 8% per year. Commercial launch alone is growing at 14.6% annually. SpaceX is hiring in Texas. Blue Origin is hiring in Florida. The skills transfer almost one-for-one. A workforce transition program, modeled on existing BRAC frameworks, with retraining funding and priority hiring pipelines, turns this from a job-loss story into a workforce-upgrade story.
The choice isn’t between SLS jobs and no jobs. It’s between one government program capped at one launch per year and a commercial sector growing at 14.6%.
The Real Question
The Moon will be claimed; by presence, by infrastructure, and by the economic systems built to sustain them. The window to set the operational tempo, governance norms, and resource access standards of the cislunar economy is open now. It will not stay open indefinitely. SLS, at one mission per year, cannot hold it. Commercial architecture, scaled and funded with appropriate urgency, can.
The data does not require optimism. It requires arithmetic.
$2,400 per kilogram versus $80,882. 6,150 metric tons to TLI per year versus 27.2.
The commercial sector hasn’t merely caught up to government-built heavy lift. It has lapped it.